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The Rise of Cyber Bullying
santos_douglas writes "The Detroit Free Press has an article detailing the problems schoolchildren now face in the form of online cyber bullying. As if parents didn't already have enough to worry about! Examples include rumor spreading typically via text messaging, threatening emails, invasive pictures taken with camera phones, and the most extreme - creating entire websites to criticize/threaten/harass another student. The article suggests many tips for combating the problem - chief among them being the establishment of specific school policies. I suppose this is another example of an inevitable downside to the interconnected world. Mandatory Google search for your added reading pleasure."
Does Front Page Express still come free with Windows? I hope not...
The guitars sound good, now give me about 10db more on the cow bell.
If I decide to start bullying someone on the ACLU message boards will the ACLU take it down? Wouldn't it violate my speech rights if they do even if it is slander?
I am not taking a position pro or con on the ACLU but it does seem like an interesting situation.
Just as an interesting thing to add, the ACLU does have a student rights forum
some kid had set up a website devoted to hating this teacher, school found out about it and he got excluded. This isn't limited to schools of course, anyone can be the victim of these, but seriously, in real life this would cause you trouble, but on the internet things like this are easily avoided.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
Wouldn't this be a perfect opportunity for the nerds to get even with the bullies?
Nobody that picked on me had the brains to put up a website! In fact, I didn't gain the respect of the jocks until CompSci class when they would ask me to help with their work. Of course, it was all on Commodore PETS (gawd, I feel old...).
has been bullying me with email for years. "Communicate with the customer or else!", and that type of thing.
i'm totally at a loss for this one. what could suck more!? every embarassing thing i did in 6th-8th grade now only resides in the distant memory of classmates. i'd probably kill myself if it was part of the internet for ever and ever. (hell, i'm still embarassed by dumbass posts i made to usenet in the 90's!)
this is a very interesting side-effect of the 'net. i don't know if this can be remedied, but it does imply that children now have accept the possibility of total transparency in their lives. as hard as it is to swallow, maybe this is how the new culture begins...
i would say i'm glad i'm not her, but this could, in reality, happen to ANYONE. it's just harder to ignore as a child, and it's harder to sue for libel/slander. but still, who to sue?
gah.
the transparent society is gonna suck.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
anyone posting AC here I'm gonna kick your ass, I know who you are and you better have your lunch money with you tomorrow.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I guess we've found yet another use for micropayments.
I got in trouble for bullying when I told a kid I had a trojan on his computer and had more access to it than he did (I was bsing) :)
My little brother's website (which includes photos and comments sections) was spammed pretty bad by a member of a rival football team.
/24.
My the profanities! I'm thinking of making Apache redirect to goatse.cx the next time someone comes back from the offender's
They're not getting the shit kicked out of them anymore.
Being bullied is getting pushed down a flight of stairs, not getting an anonymous text message about how dopey your shoes look. Sheesh.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
Can someone tell me why old people online are such assholes? My mother got involved in the most crazy group of people from an online Bingo site of all places. Then after awhile she started getting into harder stuff like Yahoo Messenger chats and video. It's fucking crazy what dirty old senior citizens talk about. I thought I stumbled into a teen chat room when I saw what kind of backstabbing dickwads prevail on these places.
Am I the only one who sees a problem with giving schools control over students' lives beyond campus grounds? Why is it that some people are so quick to abdicate control and responsibility of their children to a government beaurocracy? Are today's parents really that bad? Is the government that eager to monitor/regulate every aspect of our lives?
It's time for people to stop blaming the school system and making out kids the taxpayers' problem. If your kid is a fuck-up, be a goddamned parent and put them in their place! Stop automatically run crying to the government!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Technology only provides a comms tool. What's the difference if kids text eachother or pass notes? Write "Tammy is easy" on the boy's room wall or a web page? If anything the computer based comms makes it easier to trace and clamp down on.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
In grade/middle school some people resented me because of my grades/intelligence. You know what I did when I got picked on? I picked back. A witty remark will often slow a bully quite well. Sure, this isn't a very civilized situation, but who ever said that kids were civilized?
At least, there is no physical harm done in cyber-bullying. There's also no reasonable way to stop it. Shall we enact rules for school children that they never say anything that isn't nice on school time or off? Some of the examples amount to slander, and if they get particularly bad, you could bring a suit, but c'mon there are enough lawsuits now without every school child suing every other child for slander.
I realize that being made fun of isn't very pleasant, but that's something that kids have to deal with. Their parents should help put it in perspective.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
At first read I found this laughable but after a bit of thought I see a rekindling of an already occurring problem. Children will always be children, they will always be immature, they will always be impressionable. The problem herein is parents. I have a 10yo, and 11yo. They do not go on the internet without permission and they conduct themselves as we dictate. No chat rooms, no e-mails from anyone we dont already know. The parents of all there friends form a network with us via e-mail and the children are aware of this. They also respect it understanding the inherent dangers of the internet. Using yahoo parental controls anyone sending them e-mails with profanities or pre flagged words gets reported to us. If the account they are using is linked to a parental account reporting it to the parent is easy. So before someone starts blaming the internet look to the Parents.
Since when are Google searches mandatory? Did I miss a memo? Oh wait, I know, I bet in was in that memo with the thing about the TPS report cover sheets. Damn, looks like I'll be working this weekend to retrofit my submissions...
Same tune. Different method. Cyber bullying is no different from physical bullying in the sense of how it should be handled. The serious lack of discipline and the whole "My kid would NEVER do that!" attitude shows how poor parenting is a breeding ground for these activities. Last thing a school should do is add MORE policies. But in the end, rules and laws are created to protect us, right? Give me a break.
I'm sure I'll get modded Troll for this one but...
Is it really a school's responsibility to deal with this?? Would a school be held accountable if signs of a derogatory nature were put up around town?
The school should do something if the site is created on school property, but I don't know if there is anything they should have to do otherwise.
Still, this sucks. I can't begin to say how glad I am that this was not around when i was in school.
For one thing, such e-messages are traceable records; bullying in person is insidious because they're usually careful to make sure that no one actually can prove they did it. Parents and school officials can use these to deal with the bullies promptly.
On the other hand, kids need to be taught how to deal with stuff like that, and probably the tabloid press is a good place to use as an example: show them how some celebrities take it too seriously and waste a lot of time an energy fighting it, while others make fun of it and ignore it.
They can also make use of it to find out who their real friends are. People who believe everything they hear without checking at the source aren't much of a friend in the first place.
it's a double edged sword. I personally do not think the schools have any business moderating events that take place outside of school.
The idea of schools having policies about what students can do online (from their homes, not from school) is absurd. Sure, schools don't like it, but there's a much more serious problem of schools imposing jurisdiction outside of school. Schools have responsibility for students when they are on school grounds, participating in school functions, or on school-provided transportation. Other than that, the minute a student steps off school grounds, the school should have no jurisdiction over him.
Granted, if a student posts pictures on a private web site, and those pictures were taken at school in violation of a stated policy, then there could be room for action.
1. I'm sure somewhere a senator/president/judge is figuring out someway to use this to further erode our rights in this country.
;-)
2. Why doesn't the current hate speech laws on the books take care of this sort of thing?
If some kid puts up a site about how I'm a piece of shit and offers to pay anybody 20 dollars to beat me up, don't I have recourse to go to the police?
What's considered a hollow threat and what's considered authentic?
I also stand proudly among the many fellow geeks who were pushed around and told repeatidly that I was going to die either at lunch, in the hall or after school at the hands of [insert random roving band of fucktards].
That's it, my child is going to he homeschooled. I figure the money I save on bulletproof vests and lunch money, I can put towards social interaction classes
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
What ever happened to being stuffed into a locker?
..was horrified to discover an entire site had been created to insult and threaten her.
Why should this surprise anyone? 20 years ago this would have been '..was horrified to discover an entire bathroom wall had been created to insult and threaten her'.
Now to invent a cell phone that can give wedgies...
-t
http://unmoldable.com W:"No one of consequence" I:"I must know" W:"Get used to disappointment"
aka revenge of the nerds. A website where picked-on kid reports the bullying action and the names of the bullies, to include e-mail address, cell phone number, IM nick, address, etc. Sympathic souls would take up the cause to harass the bully in creative ways. I envision it as the slashdot effect for punks...
The article sux0r5, and so does the author, MIKE WENDLAND!
MIKE WENDLAND, I've got embarrassing pictures of you!
And I know where you work, MIKE WENDLAND!
I'll be watching to see if you write any more of your "columns", MIKE WENDLAND!
Yeah, don't you forget it MIKE WENDLAND. I'll be watching every Monday and Friday, and alternate Tuesdays and Thurdays.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
1) Bully hurts nerd 2) Nerd makes website insulting bully 3) Bully hurts nerd worse
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Fight carefully. Don't h4x0r their box - let them find out how to h4x0r your box, then report them to their ISP.
I can't believe it hasn't been solved by now...that was one whole president ago! Here's the old news.
I find it interesting that a lot of the replies here deal with "how nerds can get back at the cyberbullies".
Very few, if any, are assuming that the nerds ARE the cyberbullies.
Bullying is about strength. In the real world, that can be physical or political/social. In the internet, that can be technical prowess. He who hacks better, bullies better.
It's all about lack of accountability. Think about it - in Real Life (tm) if you are an ass hat, people stop associating with you. There is accountability. In the On-Line World (tm), if you are an ass hat, you run the risk of alienating an alias. Worst case scenario - people figure out that RockinSenior78 is a jerk and exclude/ignore him. RockinSenior78 creates a new account NiceOldGuy79 and starts over.
"Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit." --Oscar Wilde
Except for what happens if the entire rest of the school sees the webpage... Then the kid may as well move to an Amish settlement.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
As someone who is currently in high school, I believe I have a unique perspective on this. This actually did happen, to a few different people at my school. Sure, it was mean thing to do to those people. However, if was the bully, I would have considered it a success. Why? Because it got one hell of a reaction from the people who were made fun of.
The main reason bullying happens is because it gets a rise out of people. Think about it: who are you most likely to bully?...the kid who you know will run crying and sobbing from the room when made fun of, or the kid who will just kind of shrug and laugh along with it.
Today was a perfect example. My ears sort of stick out and turn red when I laugh. I was with a small group of people, and we were all laughing really hard about something...I was on the verge of tears. One of them pointed out that my ears were quite red, and I just kind of laughed along with them about it. I could of gotten all defensive about it, but all it would do is make me look like a complete weirdo, and would make me an easy target for bullies.
I guess my point is, is it seems that most bullying occurs because of someone's differences. For example, the kid who is short, or has a funny voice, or whatever. However, all humans have a unique trait that makes them a little weird. By laughing along with it, you show people that it doesn't affect you. By getting defensive, all you do is make yourself a target.
Ironic that this would show up here on Slashdot because this kind of shit happens here all the time. Note: the vast majority of people here don't abuse this site...I have a small minority of abusers in mind as I write this.
/. journal almost like still having MsGeek.Org, the only diff is that someone else has to worry about security issues and assholes. It's too bad... /. used to be fun a few years ago.
Let's face it, guys, cyberbullying happens here all the time...a few twits calling each other queer, indulging in the cyber equivalent of towel-snapping in the locker room, modding people down as "flamebait," "troll," and "overrated" just because you don't agree with them or they rub you the wrong way...the irony is so thick it's not even funny.
MsGeek.Org closed down because of a group of cyberbullies and their extended attack on the site. Many of the people responsible still post here, and often. The crapflooders never have, and never will, provide anything of value on this site...they just shovel out the same crap, the same disgusting gay porn and disguised links to goatse and tubgirl. Someone needs to hit the entire lot of the crapflooders over their collective heads with a clue by four...it stopped being "cute" or "funny" years ago.
I kicked the WIPO Troll off my site and got his account pulled because he posted hardcore gay porn pics to my board using an IE exploit. He came by it rightly. I specifically started MsGeek.Org to give women in technology a "clean, well-lighted" environment to post on a Slashdot-like forum. The crapflooders ruined that, up to and including running exploits against the board software itself. The security issues got to be so much for the good people at Hosting Matters that we mutually decided it wasn't worth it.
I wish that Taco and Hemos and the rest of the founders here had the cojones to pull the accounts of those who have made posting here uncomfortable for many people. I have no problems dealing with it...I'm a 10-year Usenet veteran with the virtual purple hearts to prove it. But I have gotten emails from women who don't read Slashdot because the crap posts are so disturbing to them.
Anyway, this is why I continue to have comments turned off on my journal. I wanted one place where I couldn't be shouted down by a small minority of obnoxious idiots, and I have it. I am sorry that the stupid yahoo.com address always gets filled up with spam and people can't get email to me there. I intend to find another webmail account with a bit more space so you have some way of contacting me. I might even break down and pay Yahoo for a bigger mailbox. Whatever.
I was going to post this anonymously, but screw it...do your worst. Mod it down to Kingdom Come. I don't care anymore. Karma is worthless at this point anyway...I posted for awhile under an identity I used when posting from work, and it took me a grand total of 2 months to go from newbie to the 50 point cap. W00t. That account could have been used to troll like a mofo...instead, I retired it, Blade Runner stylee. I don't even remember the password on the account anymore, fuck it.
I'll chime in every now and again, but right now the main reason I use this site is to blog. My
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
If the school system is going to take a person's child for 8hrs/day, 5 days/week, you can't say that the parent is the only one influencing the child. A lot of kids in middle and high school probably see teachers and friends just as much, if not more, than their parents. It's not like parents WANT that, but in order to get anywhere in society (in most cases) one has to AT LEAST finish high school. In a majority of these cases the parent is probably out working so he/she can make money to keep food on the table, and maybe even pay for the child's education. In the case where the child works that's even less time he/she is at home, and more time to be influenced by others. If the government, and society as whole, is going to place such importance of going to and graduating from school, they better be making up for the time they are taking kids away from their parents.
I agree wholeheartedly, I'm 15 and at high school in the UK. Today the latest rules to 'improve discipline and school image' were revealed, they basically consist of forcing girls to remove all make-up (on top of the extremely strict uniform we've already got) and pushing us all to have school IDs which do not, AFAICS, have any purpose at all.
Not only are they wasting their time with pointless rules, they're failing miserably in educating us properly. The fact is that all they are drilling into our heads now is facts to pass exams, not understanding. I generally have a good memory for this type of information and therefore get bored quickly - given the chance I could probably learn a years syllabus in a week and do OK on the exam. IMO the solution would be give the higher ability students the chance to understand the work on a higher level, but not according to the school, all I get is a conversation something along the lines of:
"Why aren't you working?"
"I finished it all."
"Is your shirt button undone?"
"Errr.. yes, sorry"
"Sit in silence for the rest of the lesson, and you've got a detention if that button's undone again"
This is the worse end of the teaching, but it's still a daily occurance.
I think the producers of cheaters should start a new show.
BULLIES!!
Parents who have a kid that's being bullied can call up the shows producers. The producer then sends a private investigator with a video camera (and maybe a couple gorilla's in case things go bad) to follow the victum around school and after school with hidden video camera's.
Bully gets caught on tape. Shows producers go to bully's parents and say "Let us use this tape or we give it to the victums parents to SUE YOUR ASS FOR AGGRAVATED ASSAULT!! Bullies parent gladly signs away the rights to avoid civil and possible criminal court time. Bully get's publically humiliated on national TV.
Nothing takes a bully down quicker than public humiliation.
It seems that you belive that by stopping your child from seeing profianities in their typed form is protecting them. As if they don't hear worse at school.
And I dissagree with your comments, that children should be taught not to talk to unknown people online. I believe that the ability to converse with people they have never met, and most likely will never meet, is one of the most important things your child can be taught.
Thanks to the Internet, your child can make acquaintances with people from a multitude of countries, beliefs, and religions. They can learn about cultures, differences between societies, and problems or struggles people experience in everyday life. And they can do this safely.
There are still people who would rather deny their child communication with "online strangers" than educate their child about doing so responsibly. There are still parents who know so little about the Internet that they will accept the miconception that all "chat rooms" are undeground grooming places for paedophiles. Five minutes of guidance is enough to make your child understand that joining #12yroldz on AOL and repeatedly asking "wanna cyber?" is a bad idea.
The key is making your child *understand* that people hidden behind a chat room can lie. Simple as that. They need to be taught to keep their online acquaintances seperate from the real world. Make them understand that they WILL meet people who will try to harm them. With a little education, the Internet becomes a "virtual sandbox". Your child will be exposed to people - both good and bad, in a controlled and safe enviroment. There is no better way to teach your child about human nature.
I say this from personal experience. I am presently 18. During my 'childhood' I had always enjoyed the freedom of unrestricted online communication. I belive the results from this are only positive. I have learned so much, from so many...
My lifetime passion has always been programming. While in the 'real world', very few of the people around me shared this interest, online I was able to find a haven. I was able to interact with hundreds of thousands of people who not only shared my interests, but were willing to share their knowledge. I learnt to share my knowlede in return. I could collaborate on projects with people I had never met. It didn't matter that I was 12, noone knew or cared. My age was irrelevant. It was an environment in which skin color, gender, age, and nationallity are all irrelevant. A place where knowledge, contribution, and respect are honoured.
This has changed my approach in the real world. In a society where racism and religious discrimination are commonplace, children learn the negative attitudes from their peers. Having made contacts in practically every country, I didn't give in to the temptation to tag along. I actually knew the societies and people which others would criticise for no other reason than "because they're different".
I don't believe that your child will have their mind warped by pornography or bad language on the internet. If you believe they won't be exposed to these two 'evils' at their schools, you have perhaps lost contact with reality. The difference is that in the online world, attacking people with profanities results in rejection from a community, rather than cheap support from immature peers. The "u wanna fuck?" messages are frowned upon - "I'm sorry, I'd rather not sustain a sexual relationship over a 56k modem link".
I learnt, from first-hand experience, that trust takes years to build, and seconds to break. I learned to respect others, not because it was 'forbidden' to be disrespectful, but because mutual respect is what created the greatest acheivements and communities. I learned how to act when in a position of power, how to diminish rather than fuel dissagreements. Online communities, be they forums, IRC channels, or simply e-mail, have one thing in common; they are environments in which decisions aren't made with fists or knives, but via wit, intellect, and understanding. If children weren't sheided from this "for their own protection", they would grow to become better people.
A couple things to think about in regard to 'children' in schools and 'bullying'.
Children are
Worse, it's up to the victim's parents whether or not to act... leaving those with the worst homelives the most vulnerable... either to bullying or being bullied.
IMHO, if you can legally require the separation of the bully from the victim, you may have really helped one kid.
I also think the comment in the article that "... while these comments may seem silly to people who have matured, they are very devastating to the young people on the receiving end..." ignores the above reality.
It's tough to draw analogies to adult life, but what if you were legally required to show up for work? What if somebody spread a similarly scandalous rumour about you at work? Oh... let's see... while kids might think it cool to grab a peer's breasts, the reverse might just work for adults. So, your coworker starts telling people that you grabbed her breasts, and you're making passes at her all the time. So your coworkers begin to shun you. You can't quit... you're legally required to be there. You can't call the police, they won't do anything because this is just a little bit of workplace bullying. Now your boss... who happens to be 150% of your height, twice your strength and twice your weight, might just believe the person spreading the scandal, so it will be your word against theirs.
Your friends at work no longer want to be seen with you, because anyone can fall victim to such harassment... so you become ostracised... Some even join in to dispel rumours that they too might be perverts. Few people really believe the rumours, but they know you're not a safe person to be around because you... and anyone you're around is a target.
Seeing that you have no allies, people begin to pick on you, steal your office supplies, scratch your car, slash your tires.
So you keep going to work, despite all this, because you're legally forced to.
Now we're getting close except: kids don't get paid, have little control over their homelife and they've never known anything else.
Well, you can always fight back by showing up to school with a a trenchcoat and some semi automatic rifles and just take out the people that are bothering you....oh wait.
Yeah, I use it to make my Slashdot posts.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Just as I would imagine was the _alot_ of guys here, I too got picked on when I was in Junior High. For years..Got randomly spit on, punched, kicked, you name it..by a group of about 3 or 4 of em, all older than me. It was a real blast, lemmie tell ya.
Then one day, I decided I about had enough, picked up a desk, and sent it crashing straight down ontop of one of them. Crushed his larynx. He couldn't talk for months, and even when he regained his speech, he sounded like Popeye. Karma works in mysterious ways.
Anyway, back to the story. I got taken by no less than three teachers down to the Principal's office, where I was given a "5 day out-of-school suspension".. One notch below formal expulsion back in those days. Interestingly, my folks backed me up, and essentially told the school to fuck off, since I had no prior record of doing anything even remotely like that, the school knew this kid was a bully, and never bothered to do anything about him. Bottom line, I was back in school within a day...And even more interestingly, I never had a problem with any of the other bullies after that. Didn't hear a single peep.
Thats not to say I advocate violence. I don't. But if you're dealing with what amounts to a juvenille sociopath who's parents can't control him, and a school who won't protect your kid, then that's what you have to do.
I really, really don't understand how we, as a culture, arrived at the idea that we should expect our kids to "just ignore them", or "talk it out" with a bully. That has never, and will never solve anything. At the end of the day, you have a God-given right to defend yourself and your dignity. End of story.
I'm going to be a father myself, pretty soon..And if theres anything i'd want my kid to learn from my experience, it would be that if ever gets bullied, and decides to beat the snot out of some kid to reclaim a portion of his dignity, Mom & Dad will back him up on it. Ultimately, he has to learn how to handle confrontations in life. Somewhere along the line, they're going to have to learn what "nobody walks all over you without your permission" means.
It just seems my whole generation was brought up to think that "ball your fist up and teach the asshole a lesson" isn't an option.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
I was about 16 then, trying in vain to sound like a lawyer. Anyway those kids posted pictures a blurred out scanned picture of me from the yearbook, and posted some false information about me, and went to an online game I played and spread the link.. slight damage was done, but whatever, after I sent that email the site was gone within 24 hours, and they replied saying that had been taken care of.
Then again, if those kids knew how to set up a personal server.... DDoS time.
Please direct all bug reports to
I must be reading something other than what everyone else is.
It IS the responsibility of the school to provide an environment where learning can take place. Bullying, cyber or otherwise, is contradictory to this goal. This bullying is not just taking place off-campus. Its happening on the school grounds and is sometimes aided by school equipment! Schools DO need to have policies to address this No camera phones in the locker room, rules on what is appropriate on school sponsored web sites, what can be done with school equipment, do you allow instant messaging in classrooms if at all on campus...
How did we get from an article about cyber bullying to rants about parents not doing their job?
While in general I agree, sometimes it is necessary to speak to someone in their own language. Sadly, there are some people in this world who can only understand a punch in the face.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Come on. I read through the whole article and didn't see a single thing that didn't happen when I went to school, pre-Internet. Or, for that matter, I didn't read anything that I didn't hear from my parents' stories about when they went to school.
The article spent four fifths of its copy trying to make out that teasing and gossip-spreading were something novel and Internet-age. Yeah, sure. Before text-messages, kids just had no way of insulting or passing information to each other. Certainly, no schoolgirl has ever been teased about her clothes, or boy about his sexuality, before the age of the Dark, Nasty Internet.
Children are vicious. They learn the need to establish a social hierarchy long before they learn empathy. Paul Graham covers this phenomenon quite effectively in one of his essays.
Sure, the "instant-on" thing is new, but really, kids will do exactly what adults do when they want to get away from unwanted IMs: go invisible, or register a second screen-name that only their friends know.
I'm not saying it's not a problem, but it's not a new problem. I abhor lazy journalism that finds sensationalism in dressing up something as old as time (pornography, bullying, copying music) in Internet clothes, just because it's easier to scare people that way.
Charles Miller
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
From the perspective of a victim, your comment is the equivalent of blaming the woman for getting raped. Yes, it's that bad.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
Even easier if it's a Geocities page or something similar with a low transfer limit: just write a little script calling wget to download each file, then have cron (or scheduled tasks on Windows) call that script every minute.
;-)
What sweet irony it would be to have a site making fun of me for being a geek, then using abilities gained from being a geek to kill it. Nobody successfully attacks us geeks on our home turf.
It's an operating system, not a religion.
I had a very similar experience all throughout school -- unfortunately, the only thing worse than being the person everyone loves to pick on is being the extremely shy person everyone loves to pick on, so I was never able to stand up for myself the way many other people posting in this thread have. I agree that kids need to be taught how to defend themselves, but at the same time I think parents need to teach them that the things they say can have very real and lasting effects on people. I really envy the people who have found some sort of closure for all the anger that builds up after years of bullying, and I think it's tragic that so many people are graduating high school feeling like they've just escaped from a POW camp. Bullying is something that urgently needs more attention, because I don't remember any of the "zero tolerance" policies being enforced to any sort of degree while I was in school. My 2c, please excuse the rant :)
--
Amaris
This gets lots of laughs, and gives liqudsin the attention he craves. The net effect is to discourage outward signs of intelligence by belittling the "nerds." Ha Ha Ha. You sure are cool.
God forbid anybody is smart in this dumbed-down society.
Pathetic.
Visit the best Liberal Blog: DU
I am surprised that no one has cited this article yet: Why Nerds are Unpopular.
Paul raises several ideas which are interesting...
Like a politician who wants to distract voters from bad times at home, you can create an enemy if there isn't a real one. By singling out and persecuting a nerd, a group of kids from higher in the hierarchy create bonds between themselves: attacking an outsider makes them all insiders. This is why the worst cases of bullying happen with groups. Ask any nerd: you get much worse treatment from a group of kids than from any individual bully, however sadistic.
One of the most important parts of growing up is learning how to deal with violence. In particular, learning when to use violence, and when not to use violence. Learning when and how to escalate or deescalate a violent encounter. Violence is a part of society and of human existence. It is inescapable. As long as we have fists and teeth there will be bullying, robbery, rape and war, and the need to defend oneself from these. Violence is neither right nor wrong in and of itself. It is a merely a tool.
For example, if a thief snatched a purse from an old woman and three guys jumped the thief and beat him up, they would be heroes and their action would be morally right. If three guys jump a random guy on the street and thrash him, they would be criminals and morally wrong. If you are threatened with a gun and you shoot back with your own gun, your use of violence would be justified. If someone called you names and you shot him, you would be wrong.
A child needs to learn these things and more. If he is male in many societies, he will be expected to be the defender of his family and his nation. He may have to mercilessly kill and maim as a soldier if his nation is under attack, the ultimate shame and the ultimate honor. He must come to terms with that.
How a child responds to bullying and whether or not he bullies others is part of the process of learning about violence. It will determine whether he eventually becomes a felon, a bully, a coward, a doormat, or simply a well-adjusted member of society. I feel that many children aren't learning the right lessons. The whole topic has somehow become taboo in public discourse, like sex education was in the past.
If a child is forbidden to fight back, even after all reasonable peaceful methods of resolving the issue have been exhausted, then he will learn to be walked on. He will never learn when and how much violence is right or wrong and develop a healthy spectrum of responses to violence. These are the people who will silently be bullied one day, then kill everyone with SMGs the next, since they know of nothing between total submission and total war. Conversely, if a child is allowed to bully others, or to escalate to violence before peaceful means are exhausted, then he is on his way to jail if nothing is done.
There is some happy medium between psychopath and pacifist, between bully and victim. It is enshrined in a society's laws and culture, and transmitted through media and family. A child needs to discover it. He needs to learn how to respond to an insult, a malicious rumor, a threat, a punch, a gun and a war. It's just part of growing up.
Never start a fight, but always end one. Violence must be avoided as far as possible, but no further. Violence is always wrong, but sometimes it is also right.
Well, you just said something weird and awkward, dude. Nobody likes feeling uncomfortable and will support anyone who helps them feel better, even if they are a tosser.
liquidsin's comment wasn't funny because he put down ebh, but because he parodied the above situation.
Bullying is part of human nature. You can't eliminate it in schools, and if you did, you'd only be depriving kids of a chance to learn how to deal with it in the real world.
Chronically-bullied kids need to be taught skills to deal with these situations. Martial arts (to deal with confrontation), humour (to get everyone on your side) & game theory (understanding the basic psychology of situations) all helped me.