-
Welcome to Smogon! Take a moment to read the Introduction to Smogon for a run-down on everything Smogon, and make sure you take some time to read the global rules.
-
Congrats to the winners of the 2023 Smog Awards!
Serious What should we do about bullying?
- Thread starter Cresselia~~
- Start date
Smogon sure has a lot of bullied kids... This has a lot of likes but I've never been bullied and don't know anyone who has been bullied. Even if that poster doesn't leave his house, virtually all bullying happens in school and he had to have gone to school (unless he was home schooled, which I doubt). So, dumb comment, imo.
As for bullying, we should just be stricter to kids who bully and get the bullied to report it. Perhaps get the schools to explain how bad bullying is. That's all.
I got the absolute shit bullied out of me in Primary school. It was insane. My first years of school were miserable. That teachers tried just about everything they could to intervene and nothing worked. So what happened? I changed. I changed what was causing all the bullying to be directed at me (my name btw) but that didn't help that much either. Do you know what I did after that? Nothing. I put up with any punches or name-callings that came my way and it slowed down. And by the time I was older if anyone bullied me too much I could beat the shit out of them, that worked very well.
Though it's true that bullying doesn't usually help people (in my case I feel like it did slightly by teaching me how to stand up for myself) bullying usually doesn't ruin people either. If people are pushed to the point of suicide or doing any other insanely drastic thing it is one of three reasons: That person is stupid, That person probably has something wrong aside from being bullied, or the bullying hasn't been dealt with in any form. Bullying is not something that is going to disappear or even decrease so because of that I think kids and teachers should be educated how to react to bullying rather then how to prevent it.
Though it's true that bullying doesn't usually help people (in my case I feel like it did slightly by teaching me how to stand up for myself) bullying usually doesn't ruin people either. If people are pushed to the point of suicide or doing any other insanely drastic thing it is one of three reasons: That person is stupid, That person probably has something wrong aside from being bullied, or the bullying hasn't been dealt with in any form. Bullying is not something that is going to disappear or even decrease so because of that I think kids and teachers should be educated how to react to bullying rather then how to prevent it.
"it didn't affect me that much so i don't think it's that bad, let me assume the same about everyone and that the conditions are the same as well"
"also people who have been affected by their experience so much that they want to kill themselves are stupid lel"
"also people who have been affected by their experience so much that they want to kill themselves are stupid lel"
I definitely agree. Being bullied reflects the person itself. Bullies are bullies. Bullied are bullied. And anybody else are anybody else. It's up to the bullies and bullied on how they can convert themselves to anybody else...
In my experience, when my family moved to NY from Oklahoma in my high school days, a guy immediately tried to bully me. The next day, I went to a brawl with him, I knocked him out (I'm a huge guy tho) and got suspended for 2 weeks. I sacrificed 2 mos of being grounded by my dad and everything was great after that. You can argue that "nah you're a huge guy, you can defend yourself!", but for me there are other ways to avoid being bullied. Ignoring is one.. getting help from you parent/teacher/guardian is one.. but the best thing you can do is change. I got this fat ass friend back in high school who's getting bullied a lot. On the first time he told me about that, I told him move his fat ass and change. It took him years to get to that and, bullying stopped and he plays pro soccer now.
In my experience, when my family moved to NY from Oklahoma in my high school days, a guy immediately tried to bully me. The next day, I went to a brawl with him, I knocked him out (I'm a huge guy tho) and got suspended for 2 weeks. I sacrificed 2 mos of being grounded by my dad and everything was great after that. You can argue that "nah you're a huge guy, you can defend yourself!", but for me there are other ways to avoid being bullied. Ignoring is one.. getting help from you parent/teacher/guardian is one.. but the best thing you can do is change. I got this fat ass friend back in high school who's getting bullied a lot. On the first time he told me about that, I told him move his fat ass and change. It took him years to get to that and, bullying stopped and he plays pro soccer now.
I got this notion that if you're being bullied, there's something wrong with you. Why not change it?
The problem with bullying is nobody can stop it. Punishing will make matters worse. It's now up to the bullied on how to deal with it. Don't be a lazy ass and hopefully somebody will save you from it.
The problem with bullying is nobody can stop it. Punishing will make matters worse. It's now up to the bullied on how to deal with it. Don't be a lazy ass and hopefully somebody will save you from it.
I get bullied by user Pwnemon. Somebody help please. He has also maliciously bullied user Fangame10 and many others.
Lol
Bullying will always exist, the only thing you can do is not be one yourself and defend yourself and others. Schools hold so many anti-bullying programs and assemblies, the only thing that works is if the person getting picked on defends themself and is confident in themself OR if someone else defends them and stands up to the bullies for them. It may not even stop the bullying(again bullying will always exist), but it makes the bullies look like a bunch of jack asses real fast rather than a couple of "tough guys" which gets rid of a lot of the problem.
So next time you see someone getting bullied don't think "man I wish someone would make bullying less prevalent, what could be a solution to this issue in society" and just go over there and tell those mother fuckers to stop.
Edit: Just like Goku =]
Lol
Bullying will always exist, the only thing you can do is not be one yourself and defend yourself and others. Schools hold so many anti-bullying programs and assemblies, the only thing that works is if the person getting picked on defends themself and is confident in themself OR if someone else defends them and stands up to the bullies for them. It may not even stop the bullying(again bullying will always exist), but it makes the bullies look like a bunch of jack asses real fast rather than a couple of "tough guys" which gets rid of a lot of the problem.
So next time you see someone getting bullied don't think "man I wish someone would make bullying less prevalent, what could be a solution to this issue in society" and just go over there and tell those mother fuckers to stop.
Edit: Just like Goku =]
When I say bullying has been around for a long time and wont stop anytime soon I get a bunch of raging replies from ex bully victims ._.
Bullied kids bullying others, how ironic
Bullied kids bullying others, how ironic
Most of us only replied once, so it's not bullying...
Okay now to conflate the issue with something much more severe because I found the word substitution to be kinda hilarious, especially given a lot of the "bullied kids should just toughen up" and "bullying is just a constant" rhetoric in this thread.
And that's just this page! There's a whole thread of fun to be had here. (For the record I did this indiscriminately for all alterable posts on this page, so some posts are MUCH more fucked than others upon murder-substitution).
TL;DR Smogon will murder you in your sleep unless you stop being such a pussy. And nothing will ever change that.
And that's just this page! There's a whole thread of fun to be had here. (For the record I did this indiscriminately for all alterable posts on this page, so some posts are MUCH more fucked than others upon murder-substitution).
TL;DR Smogon will murder you in your sleep unless you stop being such a pussy. And nothing will ever change that.
Cresselia~~
Junichi Masuda likes this!!
So I was right. Even when stopping the said cause isn't going to work.
And punishing doesn't help either.
I think the best way to deal with bullying is to deflect it. By talking back but not straight back, apply some humour to make the bully sound very silly.
But I won't imagine a 9 year old kid to be able to do that.
I didn't pick up this skill until I was in university. (But it does work, no one messes with me now)
Okay, so, for the record, switching tenses in the middle of a sentence is going to cause confusion. You're going from past to present to future all in the same sentence, which makes it difficult to tell what you actually mean or be sure that you didn't just misspell something.
That out of the way, though, you didn't actually respond to the body of my post.
What are you been gonna talking about!?
I think "changing so you're not bullied" is far worse than several of the "solutions" mentioned in this thread. It teaches kids to be fearful of social control and relinquish their own happiness to fit the expectations of others. It also enforces the idea of a "normal" that we as a society are struggling to break free of. I've been made fun of because I'm a gamer and gaming still carries a big stigma because nerds are a bunch of greasy slimy loser four eyes just asking for a wedgie, right? I refuse to give up something that genuinely makes me happy simply to appease others. How will you function in adulthood if you so easily succumb to social pressure? I think we would have a far better time with tolerance as a society if we aren't put into molds because of social control that began at childhood.
Ideally, actually unsavory things like shitty personalities and lack of hygiene can be addressed through appropriate intervention. I would bet that they aren't the most common causes of being bullied, though...it's mostly being 'different'.
Also,
Ideally, actually unsavory things like shitty personalities and lack of hygiene can be addressed through appropriate intervention. I would bet that they aren't the most common causes of being bullied, though...it's mostly being 'different'.
Also,
http://i.imgur.com/OOA8QzF.jpg
The unfortunate truth is that there's no easy answer when it comes to bullying. Trying to say 'all bullies do this because X' will never work, because (as much as they may be jerks), bullies are people too, and have their own complexities and reasons for acting the way they do. Not that this in any way justifies their actions, it just makes it more difficult to solve the problem. Ultimately it comes down to a case by case basis, and the biggest problem that arises is that people want an easy, catch all answer because the time it takes to solve the problems case by case is time that bullying continues. An unfortunate conundrum, but really the best solution may not always be the fastest one. Thinking long-term is something that's gotten a lot harder as the world we live in has begun to move faster and faster.
Stratos
Banned deucer.
We have to realize though in our haste to blame authority figures how hard it is for them to pick out actual bullying from friendly teasing. For those who aren't able to observe the social interaction multiple times or from a closer angle, the two are basically indistinguishable. Furthermore, not every retaliation can be condoned under the excuse of "he was bullying me" because it wouldn't take long for a bully to wise up and start using that same excuse himself. Adults are actually kind of screwed in how able they are to handle bullying, and if the bullies really want to keep it up, they'll probably be able to. Trust me, this isn't coming from the cool guy who never had to deal with this shit; the bullying I suffered in middle school was enough to drive me into suicidal thoughts (though fortunately never attempts), and I thought the exact same things about the ineffectiveness of adults. But being removed from the situation now by a matter of years I can see how difficult it would be for them to handle it, and how when they were aware of my being bullied, they did handle it basically to the best of their limited ability. The exact same things said by a friend can be loving, and by an enemy can be bullying. The slightest queues of fear and power are all that signals the latter.
When i was in that situation, the only way i found to get out of it was to find friends who were removed entirely from the social sphere and eventually improve my ability to comport myself around others. Not others at the bottom of the bullying totem pole but just people who were too busy watching the last airbender to give a shit about social strata. And i wish I could offer a better solution, and I know some jackass is going to go "wow pwne hard as fuck tellin these poor kids improve urself," but I can't.
When i was in that situation, the only way i found to get out of it was to find friends who were removed entirely from the social sphere and eventually improve my ability to comport myself around others. Not others at the bottom of the bullying totem pole but just people who were too busy watching the last airbender to give a shit about social strata. And i wish I could offer a better solution, and I know some jackass is going to go "wow pwne hard as fuck tellin these poor kids improve urself," but I can't.
People innately seek challenges because of boredom. They don't need to be given the challenge of emotional trauma in order to learn about overcoming obstacles. I don't doubt that many people learned important lessons from being bullied; however, it's possible to learn the same lessons from healthy challenges as well. Also "learning that the world can be shitty" doesn't have to last your entire school career; if you can learn trigonometry in a semester, you can learn that there are shitty people who can make you feel like crap from isolated occurrences.
Traumatic relationships in general are a really bad educational tool, be it hitting or bullying or other abusive punishment. Avoiding things that caused you trauma in the past is really the easy part, and it works really well for life lessons like "don't touch the stove when it's on" or "don't steal things or you go to jail". The much more difficult part of a traumatic relationship is avoiding new, unknown things that will set off punishment or abuse; from my experience, this is the part that the abused fixates on and what makes the situation feel helpless. It is much scarier as you are dealing with unknowns. If the abused is operating under the mindset that he needs to avoid behavior that causes him to get bullied, the stress of each new thing grows as he seems "unable" to figure out the right behavior with an increasing pile of failed attempts. As the number of situations that will lead to abuse rises, the abuser starts to exert more and more control by removing degrees of freedom from your life.
So while it's great to make lemonade out of lemons I don't think we need to accept the presence of bullying as useful or okay in any way. Also, I think those who successfully "changed to not be bullied" either removed themselves from the situation or retaliated; they didn't change according to the terms of the bully.
Traumatic relationships in general are a really bad educational tool, be it hitting or bullying or other abusive punishment. Avoiding things that caused you trauma in the past is really the easy part, and it works really well for life lessons like "don't touch the stove when it's on" or "don't steal things or you go to jail". The much more difficult part of a traumatic relationship is avoiding new, unknown things that will set off punishment or abuse; from my experience, this is the part that the abused fixates on and what makes the situation feel helpless. It is much scarier as you are dealing with unknowns. If the abused is operating under the mindset that he needs to avoid behavior that causes him to get bullied, the stress of each new thing grows as he seems "unable" to figure out the right behavior with an increasing pile of failed attempts. As the number of situations that will lead to abuse rises, the abuser starts to exert more and more control by removing degrees of freedom from your life.
So while it's great to make lemonade out of lemons I don't think we need to accept the presence of bullying as useful or okay in any way. Also, I think those who successfully "changed to not be bullied" either removed themselves from the situation or retaliated; they didn't change according to the terms of the bully.
I dont know why I'm being quoted. My suggestion is to punish kids who bully and have the bullied report it more often.
My first part of the post was challenging the notion that bullying is as common as stepping outside. Like its a shared experience such as puberty... It's not and it would certainly be a bigger issue to schools if it was.
Well, first of all, sorry for being so aggressive right of the bat on my previous post. I'm pretty sure you didn't deserve it, but the whole bullying thing really gets to me. Yeah, sorry again, it was wrong of me to do that. :/
In any case, I think the consensus is that it really isn't bullying if it isn't getting to you. So yeah, friendly teasing, which you don't mind, isn't really bullying. It doesn't hurt you, so it's ok. I agree with you on that, actually. As I got over the whole bullying thing and made some real friends (which were not any of the bullies, I actually had to get to new social circles to do that. Leaving home for college helped at that.) obviously the whole teasing thing came into play, that's cool. It's really, REALLY different from actual bullying, where you feel helpless.
This is true SOMETIMES, but not frequently enough to just throw this kind of advice around. Or are you saying it was my fault for having a fucking big head? Maybe I should have bash edit against the wall until it got smaller, I guess. That sure would fix the bullying!Vein said:
I also got bullied for being absolutely clueless in social contexts, so I'd screw up a LOT in social situations and get mocked for it. While that could be "my fault", is it really fair to bully a kid for being "slow" in getting social cues? I had a really hard time with that and only a few years ago (starting at about 17) is that I started being able to socialize normally. I don't think the bullying helped with that at all. It actually made me want to avoid people at all costs, which slowed down my "social learning" (if I can call it that) even more.
While I agree that distinguishing true bullying can be hard sometimes, adults can still do stuff like, I don't know, not charge victims with felonies for trying to prove the abuse is real.
What makes you assume it didn't affect me? I changed my preferred name due to the amount of bullying I received I consider that to be quite a change.
Stupidity is just one of the reasons. I truly believe that anyone who commits suicide well being in the right state of mind does not have a grasp on how serious committing suicide is. I had a small time of my life were I was depressed and though it is the most miserable feeling ever I never considered committing suicide.
Of course if someone does commit suicide due to being bullied and are aware of what committing suicide means then yes, the bullying more then likely has not been dealt with. I don't think I can elaborate more on this topic as I have never had suicidal thoughts and these are just my opinions. But I do not think that everyone who commits suicide is stupid.
When did anyone ever say that no punishment should be given to the perpetrators ? Though reading over some posts it's true that it's occasionally implied I don't think of any of us want bullies to receive no punishment whatsoever. Hell I stated in my post that the bullies that bullied me actually did get punished. It just didn't stop the bullying. I also stated that I changed and that didn't help either. What ended up helping was changing how I reacted to bullying, not my own personality.
I'm not really sure how to reply to this so I'll just give you this thought. The punishment for murder is at least to my knowledge a lifetime or close to a lifetime in jail. Also I think there truly has to be something wrong with you if you murder someone in cold blood. The punishment for bullies is at most a slap or a stern talk and perhaps in very bad situations a suspension. Also most bullies are normal people. There is nothing specifically wrong with them. Y'know what if you punish bullies with a lifetime in prison I'm almost certain the amount of bullying would decrease. But that's just a bit unfair don't you think?
To summarise my opinions on bullying: It's almost never the victims fault. Unfortunately though the victim is the one that usually has to do something about it.
Yeah I guess I will make slightly more serious post in thread now.
Problem with bullying isn't the people being bullied. The appropriate response to bullying isn't to just tell the victim to change so that they aren't bullied so much, or to just deal with it and assure them that it's valuable life experience or anything. That's victim blaming 101 right there.
I think I should also mention that bullying is more serious than most people probably realize. When people think "bully", the idea seems to be that it's that kid everyone knew (at the very least, knew from the movies) who would call other kids names, throw sand in their faces on the playground, and just generally be a brat. However, full-blown bullying isn't just kids being obnoxious, or devil-horned cannonballs trying to push you into lava. It's akin to what we in the adult world would call "harassment". Nobody should have to deal with that, let alone be told that it's good for them and builds character.
The real issue is just how far to take action when one kid is bullying another, as the child doing the bullying is still just a child who doesn't know much better. Another problem is that children being bullied are also just children who are clueless about how to handle their situations, which makes it difficult to get a clearly-articulated description of the problem or to get enough information to do anything about perceived problems. This is just speculation, but there's also the possible issue that schools don't necessarily have the appropriately-placed bureaucratic machinery to deal with this serious sort of thing on a systematic, consistent basis, so a lot of the decision-making falls on the normal disciplinarians (the teachers in the room) who (understandably) tread lightly by erring on the side of not doing anything rather than taking the wrong course of action. And of course, the pervasive victim-blaming attitude doesn't help any of this.
TL;DR: Bullying isn't acceptable and we shouldn't be changing the victim to try to solve it.
Problem with bullying isn't the people being bullied. The appropriate response to bullying isn't to just tell the victim to change so that they aren't bullied so much, or to just deal with it and assure them that it's valuable life experience or anything. That's victim blaming 101 right there.
I think I should also mention that bullying is more serious than most people probably realize. When people think "bully", the idea seems to be that it's that kid everyone knew (at the very least, knew from the movies) who would call other kids names, throw sand in their faces on the playground, and just generally be a brat. However, full-blown bullying isn't just kids being obnoxious, or devil-horned cannonballs trying to push you into lava. It's akin to what we in the adult world would call "harassment". Nobody should have to deal with that, let alone be told that it's good for them and builds character.
The real issue is just how far to take action when one kid is bullying another, as the child doing the bullying is still just a child who doesn't know much better. Another problem is that children being bullied are also just children who are clueless about how to handle their situations, which makes it difficult to get a clearly-articulated description of the problem or to get enough information to do anything about perceived problems. This is just speculation, but there's also the possible issue that schools don't necessarily have the appropriately-placed bureaucratic machinery to deal with this serious sort of thing on a systematic, consistent basis, so a lot of the decision-making falls on the normal disciplinarians (the teachers in the room) who (understandably) tread lightly by erring on the side of not doing anything rather than taking the wrong course of action. And of course, the pervasive victim-blaming attitude doesn't help any of this.
TL;DR: Bullying isn't acceptable and we shouldn't be changing the victim to try to solve it.