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Studies Reveal Why Kids Get Bullied and Rejected
Thelasko writes "I'm sure many here have been the victim of bullying at some point in their lives. A new study suggests why. '...now researchers have found at least three factors in a child's behavior that can lead to social rejection. The factors involve a child's inability to pick up on and respond to nonverbal cues from their pals.' The article sketches out some ways teachers and councilors are working with bullied kids to help them develop the missing social skills."
Indeed it is. According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, belonging is prioritized below physiological needs and safety.
ANOREXIC ANDY
"There's a lot of hate around here."
-Gentry Robler, Santana High sophomore
The Santee rage massacre took place less than two years after Columbine, and this time, thanks in part to the pathetic figure of Andy Williams, people started to seriously consider the role bullying might have played. But there was resistance.
In the immediate aftermath, Santana High School officials and local law enforcement officials either denied growing reports that he was a victim of bullying, or else they argued that even if he had been bullied it had nothing to do with the shooting.
Andy's appointed lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Randy Mize (his father could not afford to hire a private attorney), listed eighteen incidents of bullying just in the weeks leading up to the shooting, including "burned with cigarette lighter on his neck every couple of weeks," "sprayed with hair spray and then lit with a lighter," "beat with a towel that caused welts by bullies at the pool," and "slammed against a tree twice because of rumors." These "rumors" of course were rumors of the sexual orientation sort, the most devastating of all bombs you can drop on a newcomer kid who is incapable of defending himself. Jeff Williams, Andy's father, later said, "Some of the stuff basically borders on torture."
As Andy quickly learned, Santana High's culture combined the lethal cruelty of coastal California suburbia with familiar, rural trailer park hazing. He wanted out. He visited his mother in South Carolina a few months before his attack, and hoped to move back with her. When he visited old school friends in rural Maryland on that same trip, he told them that kids at his high school regularly egged his father's apartment or stole his homework and threw it into garbage bins. They called him "faggot" and "bitch" and "gay" and taunted him for not fighting back when he was bullied. Worst of all, much of the abuse came from the neighborhood "friends" he hung out with, got stoned with (he turned stoner to try to earn acceptance), and from whom he tried and failed to learn to become a skate rat.
Some were students at the high school, some weren't. Andy's decision to hang out with students from another school, which suburban kids don't often do, in spite of the fact that these "friends" abused him at least as much as the Santana High "friends," says a lot about the choices he faced. If Andy could have learned to skate, he might have been accepted by a second-tier clique in the coastal California public school hierarchy. As it was, not only did he never live up to the skate rat standards on the ramp, but to punish him for being a dork, his skateboard was stolen on at least two occasions by his friends, who then taunted him for being too much of a fag to protect his board.
In spite of their relentless taunting, Andy joined them at the local skate park, where they got buzzed on liquor and weed, skated on the ramps (he just watched), and tormented Andy Williams.
"His ears stuck out, he was small, skinny, had a high voice, so people always picked on him 'cause he was the little kid," said Scott Bryan, a friend of Williams.
He earned the nickname "Anorexic Andy."
"He was picked on all the time," student Jessica Moore said. "He was picked on because he was one of the scrawniest guys. People called him freak, dork, nerd, stuff like that."
Laura Kennamer, a friend, said, "They'd walk up to him and sock him in the face for no reason. He wouldn't do anything about it."
Anorexic Andy: before puberty...
Even Andy's fifty-nine-year-old, neighbor Jim Crider, observed, "Williams looked like someone working hard to fit in with his peers-and not quite succeeding. His clothes did not match what the other kids were wearing. When he talked, others didn't always pay attention."
Anthony Schneider, who was fifteen when the Santee shootings happened, both confirmed Crider's observation and gave a small glimpse into the dumb, cool poison of this schoolyard culture there: "He didn't have that
We keep kinds back (retain them in lower grades) for academic reasons, but seldom for social reasons. Often, I suspect, simply delaying entry into school for socially awkward kids might solve a lot of this. Either that or enroll overly aggressive kids a year ahead of time.
Are you f'n serious? Keep bullied kids back a year and further bully them ("The System" bullies them by keeping them back a year), encouraging more bullying (the bullies are now armed with, "dumb dumb just got kept back a year") and docking them one year of pay (they now lose out on one year's income potential before retirement)?
Fix the problem: punish the bullies and the teachers and parents that turn a blind eye to them.
Bullies are cowards. All of them.
The best thing to do with a grade school bully (assuming I'm talking to someone the same age) is to hit them in mouth. Hard. You well then either get hit back a couple of times -- which will hurt, but not be tragic -- or not. In either case, the bully will find someone else to pick on. Learning that getting beat up on the playground isn't the end of the world can itself be incredibly freeing -- and usually leads to it never happening again.
I have no patience for bullies -- but I have even less patience for helicopter parents who replay their own sad lives as victims through their kids and insist the world be made into a padded safety zone where nobody says mean things or looses at tag any more.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
What helped me was someone asking an older kid at my church (yes, I once was religious) to give me some pointers on how to deal with the bullies that were always after me. We went for a walk and when we were alone, he sat me done and said "Punch them. Plain and simple, bullies are cowards, and the minute you bloody their nose, they don't want anything to do with you."
Not exactly a Christian message of cheek turning, but in the end that's exactly what I did. When I was fifteen, a big prick who had been hastling me shoved me on the stairs into school, and I dropped my books, turned around and socked him one in the ear. Hurt like a son of a bitch, but the bastard just took one look at me, utterly confused, and then walked away, and never ever looked at me again.
That's what solves bullying, beating the fuck out of bullies.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
All these years I thought "turn the other cheek" meant you just put up with bullying.
Then I read a sentence in this book by some Christian author I can't remember. Anyways, he said
"You can't turn the other cheek if it's been turned for you".
There is a key distinction between meekness and weakness I was not understanding. Now that I have discovered that, it is my choice whether I choose to fight back or not. I don't feel "morally obliged" to be passive. I evaluate whether it is important for me to defend myself at that moment, and I act on that. The real problem all along for me was a control issue. Now that I have that control, I realize the power struggle for what a silly thing it is, and it just doesn't bother me. I also am much older now and these things just don't happen anymore.
I plan to do what another /. poster wrote about a year ago. His daughter [2nd, 3rd grade or something] was being abused by the school bully. He contacted the teachers, several times about it, to no avail; after the girl was physically hurting his daughter. He contacted the school principle, who didn't do anything, shrugged it off, not a big deal, etc. So he told his daughter, the next time this happens, grab her hair next to her scalp tightly, and push her head down as hard as you can while you pick your knee up right into her face.
The girl did it, gave the bully a bloody nose, teachers and principle were ALL OVER her and /. poster; threatened him with a lawsuit over his daughter's conduct. So he explained everything to his lawyer and had him write them a nastygram. They and the bully's parents shut up.
I liked this story because
1). he tried to deal with it through the most acceptable means [of course they weren't going to do anything about it, but he tried at least and so had legal grounds to stand on]
2). The bully never bothered his daughter again. Neither did anyone else in school.
Bullies are cowards. All of them.
Actually studies have shown the complete opposite (I read it on paper). It used to be fashionable to attribute this kind of behavior to low self esteem, until someone actually bothered to investigate this, and found that bullies actually tend to have unrealistically high self esteem and tend to be more bold and impulsive than average.
From this, the logical next step would be to subject a bully to so much abuse that his self esteem is shattered and see if this changes their behavior. This would obviously be immoral.
This is very true. It's all part of the dominance hierarchy.
The alphas are alphas. The betas are worried about their position and therefore often turn to bullying those beneath them to keep them down. The deltas, gammas, and omegas are below.
I wish I could remember the studies offhand, but there were a handful where the did some social experimentation by taking groups of bullies and isolating them together as a social group: Some stayed bullies, some got bullied. The more interesting study was when they took the bullied kids and isolated them together: new bullies formed while others remained on the bottom.
School seems to be one of the worst environments for bullying, and there's a good reason for that: There are no alphas in the crowd. Instead, the role of alpha is taken by the teachers/administration (the ones with real power) and because they are "separate" from the kids in High Security (erm.. high school) it's next to impossible for the deltas-gammas to bond with the alphas in order to become safe from the actions of the betas.