Slashdot Mirror
Nerds Still More Likely To Get Bullied
trashbird1240 writes "Reports on a recent meta-analysis of bullies and victims found that bullies and victims have similar personality traits, but that bullies tend to do poorly in school, as opposed to those who get bullied. Both bullies and victims are poor social problem solvers, but they resort to different tactics to handle their social ineptitude. To me this represents a huge leap forward in understanding nerd psychology."
Work out. A lot. Throughout middle school and high school, I was a huge geek (and dressed like one)...but I was also huge. In high school, at only 5'6", I weighed around 200 pounds, and could lift what the varsity football team lifted in the weightroom (and, in some cases, even more.)
I was a dork, but no one dared fuck with me. A good thing, too...I had no idea how to fight :p
Living With a Nerd
That the problem is that people are so hard-wired to find social ineptitude a problem.
There are times where I wouldn't want to hang out with people because I didn't like the people. At one point (it was between grade 8 and 9) I realized that I could be whoever I really wanted to be, and was not relegated to any kind of social outcast or nerdy clique for the rest of my days. I went out, bought some clothes, got a haircut, and emailed someone I didn't usually hang out with, and asked if they wanted to go Skateboarding. I - however - had never been great at skateboarding. However, this new friend of mine took my motion as a kind gesture and proceeded to teach me a bit so that I could hang out with him and his friends more. He understood that I had wanted to get out of any antisocial tendancies I might have had and wanted to have fun with more friends. Obviously, he was not the bullying type.
However, after a year or so of this, I began to miss the old things. Playing LAN Starcraft till 5 am, reading Fantasy Novels, and programming. Things I never had time for when there was a party that weekend, movie night at a friends house, or hanging out after class. Eventually, I went back to my old tendancies, and I really didn't care if I was labelled a nerd because I liked being alone a bit more.
What does this mean, bullies not knowing how to interact are pent up with rage, and take it out on others. There’s one problem with this bullies are very good at reading people. Quite often they can bully under every bodies nose without arousing suspicion. They even have good mechanisms to handle tense situations (like being investigated), they can even lie effectively under these tense situations. How do you think they can get away with it.
Interesting interview on NPR a few weeks back on a woman (who had been raped as a teen) who had studied middle eastern terrorists and came up with the thesis that many had been seriously sexually abused as children in the training camps. Pointing out that the common thread with terrorists and other people who went postal or Columbine was that they had been subjected to some form of grave humiliation and didn't really have a support group or other form of outlet.
Not excusing their means of retaliation, but it was interesting to draw the connection between humiliation and people who eventually snap violently. If the world had less humiliation going around and bystanders who are complicit with it, we'd all probably be better off, bullies and nerds alike.
The grey uncreative mass is neither smart nor dumb. It packs up like wolves and feeds on the dumbest among itself to feel minutely superior. This causes violent outbursts in the weakest of the mind since its the only way for the feeble minded to protect their deteriorating selfimage. The smart ones are also rejected by the pack. The highest minds seem odd and incomprehensible to the pack and need to be made apart from the maingroup to keep it coherent. While the pack dwells happily in its dull mediocre harmony, the lowest of the mind try to attract the interest of the pack by attacking the other outcasts, the high minds. The smartest ones should somehow make it seem profitable for the pack to guard them or just endure since the relieving outcome is that the high minds shouldn't have any incentive to attract the pack, who are just the right kind of average consumers for the next vc backedup startup to exploit :)
I don't know how our dutch schools compare to high schools, but for this story, it is comparable enough.
I was in my 2nd year and for the first 6 months a group of kids kept teasing, annoying, harassing me, etc. It was horrible.
I remember being in shop class reaching out for a tool that I needed to continue my work. One of the kids grabbed it after I did and tried to pull it out of my hand, I told that person that I was using it, then the kid spit on my hand.
That was the moment something snapped in my head, everything went dark, I was smart enough to drop the tool and I said one little thing: "Run."
The kid knew I was serious and started running, as did I. I jumped over chairs and desks while in pursuit only having one goal, to destroy that person.
It took 6 people to grab me and hold me against a wall until I calmed down.
That experience made sure that they didn't bother me anymore but it scared the fuck out of me.
I have learned more patience, more forgiveness and more understanding since then since I do not want to repeat an episode like that.
You are correct when some people only understand violence, I wish that was different.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
I find the tendency of spree killers toward taking out a bunch of random bystanders along with their intended targets deplorable in the extreme; but I can say completely seriously that if more instances of bullying ended in murder, and fewer in suicide, the world would be a better place.
Seeing how far you can push somebody wouldn't be such an attractive hobby if the risk of being the guy who pushed them just a little too far were there in the back of your mind...
Testify brother! I had two bullies back in my school days. Nothing I tried helped at all. I was a target and would always be nothing but a target.
One day at a school assembly one of my personal bullies pushed me just a little to far. I saw red (I am color blind) and set about beating him to death in front of the whole school. Fortunately I came to my senses before that happened, but not before breaking his nose, and jaw. Also breaking 3 ribs of the, very large, PE teacher who tried to stop me.
Word got around, and it was the last fight I ever had.
My principal was an idiot. He had the foolish belief that it takes two to fight, so he took the two combatants and made them pick up garbage unsupervised around the school. I am sure you can imagine the results.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
This is much more prevalent in public schools where we train the sheep than in private schools where we train the wolves.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Killjoy, I had a similar experience. Black out, apparently some extreme violence against the bullies, then I come to afraid of what I see I've done. I had the same results too. It scared me, I didn't know I had that kind of anger within myself, and it scares me to think I could go there again. But, one bully became a great friend, others let me be, and the jocks that happened to witness the incident kept a respectful distance from me. Just interesting to me to see such a similar story.