“Being punched by bullies” was one of the more common social interactions I had during my three years of middle school.
My suggestion, if that ever becomes the problem, would be to have the victim carry a concealed tape recorder and get the entire (verbal) portion on tape, including as much of a narration of the events as possible (“Why are you blocking me from going down this hallway?”). Armed with that recording, the guardian needs to confront the school officials and demand that effective measures be taken, or the media will become involved.
In my experience, the school administration either ignored stronger evidence or took actions which were ineffective; I never actually involved criminal court, although I should have, but I expect that they will decline to prosecute as well. The media, however, would love something like such a recording, combined with a “think of the children” banner. Threatening the administration with such a fate should be enough motivation to make them stop looking like they are looking for a solution and start looking for a solution; in addition, they might accept reasonable suggestions.
Again, I don’t think that’s what’s happening in the OP, but I think it’s important enough that anybody who has that kind of problem find it wherever they search; the low probability that my target audience is ever going to see this particular post is accounted for.
I’d urge people to think very, very carefully before going to the media in this sort of situation.
The media’s agenda is not yours: it’s to create as much interest as possible. Sure, you might get a media outlet interested in publicising wrongdoing: that might make a good story. But other outlets (or even the same one later when the initial interest has faded) will be interested in ‘monstering’ the complainers: that might make a good story, too. The school administration and their friends will be highly motivated to help in this endeavour. If you make a sufficiently large splash, every detail of your and the child’s life will be raked over for something that can be distorted to appear scandalous or wrong.
Almost nobody likes whistleblowers, and they (almost?) never prosper afterwards, regardless of the merits of their case. (I think this is a big problem for society, but hard to resolve.)
If the school administration is so committed to not seeing the problem, I’d expect that it’ll be more in the child’s interests to take them out of that school than it is to go to the media.
The hope is that the threat alone will suffice. We now enter decision theory territory when we ask if the threat becomes less credible if the follow-through is not performed.
In the abstract, general, idealized case where the threat fails, I would consider switching schools (to actually solve the problem) AND leaking the story to the media (partially out of spite, partially to provide an impetus for change benefiting others, and partially to maintain the credibility of one’s threats). In any actualized scenario, my advice might differ.
This sounds like a possible viable way of dealing with bullying, but in general, I think that if the children bring the bullying to their parents’ attention, and the parents are willing to intercede and make a serious effort on the kids’ behalf, bullying is usually solvable. It’s when adults insist that kids “need to learn to work these matters out among themselves” that troubles become intractable, and since I became an adult myself, I have on a few occasions had to remind adults that the way it works in the grown up world is that we have authorities we call on to intervene in conflicts because we don’t expect victims to be able to resolve matters amicably with their victimizers.
I think that if the children bring the bullying to their parents’ attention, and the parents are willing to intercede and make a serious effort on the kids’ behalf, bullying is usually solvable.
Also, one important step is that the parents must believe the child’s report of bullying. As opposed to e.g. thinking “this is an exaggerated version of something that is probably harmless”. (This was a mistake my parents were making all the time.)
Also, one important step is that the parents must believe the child’s report of bullying. As opposed to e.g. thinking “this is an exaggerated version of something that is probably harmless”. (This was a mistake my parents were making all the time.)
Quick, what are your thoughts on the concept of rape culture?
Give me a reasonable definition, and I’ll give you my opinion. Without at least an approximate definition I try not to have opinion on things.
(Not that I couldn’t imagine some definition myself, but what’s the point if your definition may be something very different? I think rape is a bad thing, should be punished, and should not be made fun of. That includes also rape in prisons, or when a woman rapes a man, et cetera. On the other hand, I consider rape to be in average less serious crime than murder. Please note that this answer does not include the “culture” part, because that’s the part I don’t have a reasonable definition for.)
Please note that this answer does not include the “culture” part, because that’s the part I don’t have a reasonable definition for.
Oh! It’s ok, it sounds like you’ve simply never heard it explained. In a nutshell, my analogy here is that women in grown-up society who suffer some kind of sexual violation or threat are overwhelmingly likely to meet the same blind/wilfully ignorant/worse-than-useless response that is typical of adults overlooking bullying. (It sounds like you and me both have suffered from the latter.)
So yes, this is not all of what feminists usually mean by these words - but they often do bring up such attitudes in the same vein as your description of bullying here. Given that you’ve previously decried some stereotypical “social justice” issues, including anti-sexist activism, as pointless/dishonest/hypocritical (IIRC), I wanted to point out how, this time around, you’ve independently echoed a popular feminist talking point.[1]
Here’s another analogy, with a widely used contrast of robbery vs. sexual assault:
“So you’d been drinking. Are you sure you didn’t tell him he could take the money? You know, maybe you were feeling sorry for him, feeling bad about telling him you weren’t going to lend him money any more… Are you sure you didn’t give him one last bundle of cash, out of sympathy, but maybe you’re feeling bad about it today?” “Hey-” “Maybe you’d had a few too many and it’s all a bit hazy? Are you sure you didn’t tell him he could have the money, but you can’t remember it?” “No! He stole it from me-” “What were you wearing at the time, Mr. Smith?” “Let’s see. A suit. Yes, a suit.” “An expensive suit?” “Well–yes.” “In other words, Mr. Smith, you were alone and drunk late at night with someone you had previously given money to in a suit that practically advertised the fact that you had money, isn’t that so?”
Etc, etc. Disturbingly familiar in some regards, isn’t it?
[1] Sure, a bit passive-aggressive of me… but at least I’m trying to achieve something rationalist here by pointing out that your beliefs appear not to be at reflective equilibrium.
We didn’t have a political thread on LW for a long time, did we? Would be a more appropriate place for this discussion. On one hand, I do not want to ignore your question, on the other hand, I have no desire to make this a long off-topic thread. Unfortunately, political topics are usually heavily mindkilling, they have thousands of connotations, so unless one writes a full book about the topic, there are many ways to misinterpret their answer.
Here are a few things that would deserve a longer discussion, but I don’t want to have all of those discussions right here and right now:
1) Just because a word is used, even if it has its page on wikipedia, does not mean the concept is well-defined. To quote from the wikipedia page: “there is disagreement over what defines a rape culture and to what degree a given society meets the criteria to be considered a rape culture”. What I am trying to say is that I agree that rape is bad, and I also agree that if you write a victim’s report on a web page, you will find many comments blaming the victim. I agree with this completely. The part that I don’t know (and wikipedia says there is no consensus even among people who use the word frequently) is whether this deserves to be called “culture”, and whether that means that only some people have this “culture”, or the whole culture is guilty of having this “culture”. And I have no desire to spend my afternoon having a discussion about definitions. I am willing to talk only about things that somehow translate to expected experience.
2) You speak about “overwhelmingly likely [stupid] response”, but I think that the topic of rape has no monopoly on that. In general, people are idiots. Do you expect them to stop being idiots specifically when discussing rape? I guess this website is all about the hundred mistakes people make when they think. And that’s just about thinking, because that’s what we are obsessed with; we speak about how stupid people are even when they try to be nice, polite, and reasonable. But many people don’t even try. I don’t expect people in general to have reasonable opinions about rape, just like I don’t expect them to have reasonable opinions about anything. Some of them even talk with their invisible friends, for God’s sake! I share your pain; I too wish people would be more reasonable. But today, they are not. That’s not about rape, that’s about… everything. The only exception is when people are massively brainwashed into believing something that coincidentally happens to be correct. This is why most people will give you a correct answer for “how much is 2+2″. So, expending a similar amount of energy, you could brainwash them into having the kind of reaction about rape that you want them to have. Even then, they wouldn’t have that reaction because it’s the smart reaction; they would have it, because it would be what they were brainwashed to believe. It would probably be a good thing. The problem is on the meta level; just as you can brainwash people into believing good things, you can brainwash them into believing bad things. So there is a kind of Schelling point of not brainwashing people too much, even for a good thing. I don’t have a full utilitarian analysis of consequences of breaking this Schelling point.
3) What is the overwhelmingly likely response, depends on what kind of people you interact with. Some people would have this reaction, other people wouldn’t. This is what makes me uncertain about generalizations about a culture. Who specifically is this culture? Which specific subgroup? How many people must exhibit some behavior so we can label the whole culture as a rape culture? Is it about number of people, or rather about what appears in media, or...?
4) When you say something reasonable, it is likely that at least some feminist agrees with it, and at least one feminist disagrees with it. Feminists say a lot of things. Some of them consider prison rape or woman-on-man rape an issue. Some of them don’t. I was specific about my opinion. I am not sure whether majority of feminists agree with this variant, and I don’t consider that information relevant.
5) Whether something should or shouldn’t happen, and whether some behaviors are more risky than others, those are two differently questions. Misinterpreting opinions about one of them as opinions about the other, that’s just one of many rhetorical tricks frequently used in political discussions.
6..99) Really, we could talk about it the whole afternoon.
100) Speaking about an anology with bullying, I think that: a) bullying is morally wrong and bullies should be punished; b) some actions can make bullying less likely, and it would be good to tell the victims about it. And no, whichever of the thousand connotations anyone thinks about immediately after reading this, if I didn’t write it explicitly, there is a chance I didn’t mean it.
Speaking about an analogy with bullying, I think that: a) bullying is morally wrong and bullies should be punished; b) some actions can make bullying less likely, and it would be good to tell the victims about it.
Upvoted for making this specific distinction explicit. I think it’s important to note that A and B are not contradictory and should not be treated as if B->!A
Also upvoted the parent; the failure mode it describes is real, whether or not one subscribes to “rape culture” with the quotes.
One has to be careful not to let this devolve into a “we had to destroy this village to save it” scenario. It is possible to win the battle and lose the war, that is, completely screw up the kid’s social life for the rest of his time in this school.
It’s hard to give generic recommendations, it all depends on particular circumstances. Obviously there is a balance to be struck between helicopter parenting and “as long as he’s not in a hospital it’s all fine”. In some cases it’s better to let the kid handle it himself, in some cases it’s better to go to the administration, in some cases it’s better to switch schools.
My intention isn’t to create a typical social interaction where none currently exists. My intention is to prevent non-aggressors from feeling like the only course of action is to become an aggressor, and the general-case solution to that problem requires an appeal to the social systems set in place for that purpose.
In some cases it’s better to let the kid handle it himself, in some cases it’s better to go to the administration, in some cases it’s better to switch schools.
How about teaching the kid to handle it himself, as in “okay let’s analyze this situation together and come up with some creative solutions”? That would be my first choice; get the kid to practice something like rejection theory for standing up to bullies or something like that, or practice martial arts, or invite “potential allies” out to Disneyland or I dunno, my kid isn’t getting bullied yet (that I know of).
The “traditional” way of stopping bullying is quite painful. It essentially involves treating the bully as a Skinnerian rat and hurting him every time he attacks you. You pay a high price in pain yourself, but if, basically, every time the bully hassles you he gets kicked in the balls, pretty soon he’ll stop hassling you even if each time he “prevailed” and beat you up.
Other usual ways are to use social skills (which are usually lacking) and/or bulk up / learn effective fighting.
Of course that all presupposes physical aggression and boys.
Girls tend to go for passive-aggressive emotional attacks which can be harder to deal with.
Boys will do the passive-aggressive thing if they think they can’t take you physically. I had that experience growing up; I was too big to beat up but too socially inept to handle other forms of bullying. School was hell.
Boys will do the passive-aggressive thing if they think they can’t take you physically. I had that experience growing up; I was too big to beat up but too socially inept to handle other forms of bullying. School was hell.
Did you try punching people who dissed you? That works for some people. Especially if they practice their skill at recognising the effective ways to deploy the power.
On a couple of occasions, I did. Trouble was, I was sufficiently clueless that the people who were inclined to wind me up also managed to direct my ire towards third parties who didn’t deserve it. “Let’s you and him fight,” more or less. Those were not shining moments in my moral life, although some bits of them do make funny stories twenty years later.
I have this mental list of people to locate if and when the government collapses sufficiently that law enforcement closes up shop....
Eh, it can be quite painful, but you just need to reach the point where bullying someone else is less of a hassle.
Girls tend to go for passive-aggressive emotional attacks which can be harder to deal with.
The rejection therapy and the Disneyland solution might still work here. Though in that case I’d look for advice from girls; I’ll get to that if I have a daughter AND she gets bullied; no hurry :)
Eh, it can be quite painful, but you just need to reach the point where bullying someone else is less of a hassle.
Kind of a late reply on this one, but I’ll point out that this depends on what kind of bully you’re dealing with. Not all bullies are opportunists or cowards, and in particular some are playing a dominance game which they will not permit themselves to lose. To respond to a challenge by changing targets would be to implicitly acknowledge that they don’t have dominance over their original target, something they’re unwilling to accept, so they’ll respond to challenges by escalating until one side is unable to keep up. This is the kind of case where getting outside intervention is usually the most necessary.
Some children commit suicide because of bullying. If those children instead killed their bullies, I think it would be a net improvement for the society. It would prevent those bullies to do the same with more children, and it would send a message that bullying is dangerous for both sides.
More cynically, it would motivate schools to investigate the cases of bullying when the bully is a popular person and the victim is low-status. We don’t want popular people to be killed, do we?
I think you made the assumption that each suicide would kill only one bully.
Even if it isn’t true, I’m inclined to agree that it would be a net improvement, but it would be on the opposite side of the maximum of the curve with ‘strength of response’ as the independent variable and ‘desirability of outcome’ as the dependent.
I don’t think this is an optimal or especially good way of dealing with bullies unless the bullying is so serious that it is a threat to the child’s safety. It encourages a habit of appealing to the authorities whenever things are suboptimal, instead of developing interpersonal skills to deal with the problem without an authority. It teaches the child to depend on authorities to save them when things aren’t going his/her way.
In my school at least, being a “snitch” had serious social consequences. They were despised, and often bullied more, and more furtively. Someone who can stand up to a bully, on the other, was seen as brave, as a leader.
Also, there are certainly authorities who sometimes offer help in the adult world (as Desrtopa notes) but often an appeal to an authority is difficult or impossible. What do you do if a coworker verbally bullies you? Or an in-law gets nasty? A friend of friend?
I don’t think this is an optimal or especially good way of dealing with bullies unless the bullying is so serious that it is a threat to the child’s safety. It encourages a habit of appealing to the authorities whenever things are suboptimal, instead of developing interpersonal skills to deal with the problem without an authority. It teaches the child to depend on authorities to save them when things aren’t going his/her way.
Blackmailing authorities by a smart plot that involves having a evidence that you can take to the media isn’t “being dependent on the authorities”.
You know, this environment is probably as close to the Hobbesian state of nature as it gets in modern first world countries. The solution to that has traditionally been for society to create a government to hold over itself, a leviathan able to be applied to. Thus, violence is curbed, by the threat of intervention by the overseeing power.
As in the world, so in this microsim.
Is this a desirable state? As someone who leans more towards the libertarian side of things, I think the answer is no. But despite that, there are two very valid points. The first is that like it or not, this is how the world is. You can try to set up an alternate system of governance, but if you play in a certain society, you play by their rules. Or overthrow them and institute your own rules, but that is a task of much greater scope.
Second, there has to be some rules. Life in the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short, after all. In the “state of middle school”, it’s not short, but it’s pretty nasty and brutish. This problem has to be overcome somehow, and the established way to do it is by government, that is to say in this case by authority figures. Have you got a better way? Many libertarians over the years have tried to hammer out alternatives, but as of now it’s still an open problem.
1) It teaches the child that power is in the hands of bad guys and authorities.
2) It is a strategy that is dependent on having a genuine authority that is sympathetic to one’s cause (which may not always be true).
3) It is unlikely to directly teach the bully a better way to behave, and is likely to get him/her in a lot of trouble that might affect the rest of the bully’s life, especially if his/her identity is revealed (especially ethically problematic with a young child).
4) A person, especially a child, might misunderstand a situation. The “bully” might be reacting to something offensive or hurtful that the child did. If someone goes to authorities before attempting to resolve the problem quietly, s/he risks getting the “bully” unjustly punished, and not learning about his/her own inappropriate behavior. This one is especially important, IMO.
5) If the bully is a bullying a lot of people, gathering those people together and having them unite against a bully may simultaneously allow many people to feel like they and their community has power outside what an authority grants them (this seems like a more HPMOR-type of solution to me).
6) Once something reaches the mass media, you lose all control over the outcome. Your school administrator or dean or principal might be replaced (which may or may not be a bad thing). The bully could be sent to juvie or removed from his/her family or whatever.
7) You don’t know the full context behind the event. Maybe the bully just suffered a traumatic or tragic event. Maybe s/he has a mental disorder. Sure, then s/he needs help, and the authority should help him/her get it, but that approach seems lacking in the compassion due to the child in the midst of a tragedy.
8) You shame the bully and force him/her into a corner. The bully now loses face, especially if s/he backs down. With an especially impulsive person with little regard for his/her future, this could provoke some sort of desperate, especially violent response.
My suspicion is that libertarian practices would be (especially) bad amongst young children, who have lower impulse control and experience with self-organization.
In response to Villam_Bur, your extremely specific hypothetical in response to my comment reminds me of this. In response to that exact situation, I would attempt to use interpersonal skills, to get the support of my peers, examine my own behavior, ask for advice from others that I trusted, and try to understand the bully’s actions and figure out whether it was worth the effort and potential consequences of getting him/her to stop (seriously try all these strategies, not just give some perfunctory mental equivalent of a passing glance at trying). Then I would try physical force. If all of the above were unsatisfactory, I would have no qualms about bringing it to a trusted authority figure with good judgement.
I am curious: what kind of intepersonal skills (which don’t include using authorities) would you use to deal with a person who is three times as strong as you (and most of people around you), enjoys hurting you (physically), and makes it obvious to others that only you will be hurt (unless someone tries to defend you, in which case they will also be hurt, but it will be a one-time event for them)?
Depending on your answer, my second question would be: If such a situation happened to you tomorrow (and then every day) and you couldn’t avoid it, would you prefer to use only the interpersonal skill, or would you (also) use a threat of authority?
But why would you be singled out this way, and not some other small kid? The explanation probably involves interpersonal skills at some point (I would expect likelihood of being bullied to be more correlated with being weird and friendless and “a pushover” than it is with being weak).
Also, even a small kid should be able to bite really hard, or come up with something foul-smelling that sticks in the hair or something like that—but I don’t think either one of those are what is usually meant by “interpersonal skills” :)
But why would you be singled out this way, and not some other small kid?
Would it be too unrealistic scenario to imagine that I am a best student in the classroom, and the bully is the second best, but he used to be the best one in his previous school, he cannot emotionally accept not being first and when he cannot deal with competition in a fair way, he uses his physical strength as a backup option?
People can also hate you for being good at something, not just for being weak.
even a small kid should be able to bite really hard
Yes, I used this kind of solution, and it worked. It just took me too much time to overcome the taboo about hurting other people (even in self-defense).
Learning to win fights despite a physical development disadvantage is exactly the wrong interpersonal skill to teach.
This does not seem like a claim that is universally true or obvious. If for whatever reason (such as bad judgement, incompetence at parenting or simply lack of resources) you choose to expose your child to one of the many environments where physical aggression is socially advantageous when they are at a physical disadvantage then it is neglectful to not also train them in at least the low hanging fruit with respect to succeeding in that environment.
To win one thousand fights in one thousand battles is not the skill you should be seeking. To resolve the confrontation favorably without fighting is the skill you should be teaching.
Either that, or firearm lessons. Biting and stinkbombs simply won’t work in environments where physical aggression is required, and there is no good reason for partial measures.
To win one thousand fights in one thousand battles is not the skill you should be seeking. To resolve the confrontation favorably without fighting is the skill you should be teaching.
To avoid losing a thousand fights through the mere presence of a deterrent is a valuable and generalisable lesson. Finding ways to resolve confrontation without fighting is desirable but once again I have to point out that it is not always possible. Children do not get to choose whether or which school they are subjected to and so can not rely on the most important aspects of personal boundaries (those that follow from having the ability to choose situations). If they are forced into an environment where pacifism is a suboptimal survival strategy then forcing pacifism on them for ideological reason is adding insult to injury. Or adding more injury and permanent psychological damage to injury as the case may be.
Either that, or firearm lessons. Biting and stinkbombs simply won’t work in environments where physical aggression is required,
Taking firearms to school is frowned upon. At least it is in my country, I can’t speak for anywhere else. I also haven’t ever seen either biting or stinkbombs advocated as an optimal fighting strategy for humans.
and there is no good reason for partial measures.
Yes there are. There is a reason not all wars consist of total nuclear obliteration in the opening day of conflict. There is also a reason why comparatively few physical conflicts between individuals, including individuals confined to schoolyards, are fights to the death.
“environments where physical aggression is socially advantageous” are frowned upon as well. If the people who frown upon violence in the school don’t take effective measures to address moderate violence, then they might take effective measures to address serious violence.
I think we might be talking about different things; I’m not addressing social posturing. I’m addressing things which would be felonies and treated as such if done openly by one adult to another: If someone punches me in the stomach and demands cash or he will do it again, why should age or the amount of money involved be deciding?
Fights are to lesser stakes than annihilation because the outcome is typically less important than existence to both parties. I’m not sure why the minimum required deterrent is better than the maximum possible deterrent.
That said, using weapons that are less likely to attract as much attention from an incompetent school administration while still being sufficient have a cost advantage. I suggest things which are also legitimate educational supplies, like metal or metal-edged rulers, if low-social-cost weapons are desired. As with any weapon, learn to use it effectively before you use it.
“environments where physical aggression is socially advantageous” are frowned upon as well.
That is as it should be. But you do not fix this problem by crippling the victims and still not giving them a way out.
I think we might be talking about different things; I’m not addressing social posturing. I’m addressing things which would be felonies and treated as such if done openly by one adult to another: If someone punches me in the stomach and demands cash or he will do it again, why should age or the amount of money involved be deciding?
Those things certainly should be illegal and treated as such. Authorities who control such environments and who permit such behaviour are collectively evil. But it is also abhorrent to me to cripple the victims with idealistic morality that doesn’t work in the world in which they live.
Learning to win fights despite a physical development disadvantage is exactly the wrong interpersonal skill to teach.
Is it? I agree it’s probably not the best, but is it worse than having the kid learn that he sucks, that the world is a nasty, unfair place, and that there’s nothing he can do about it?
My model says that “being punched by bullies” is much less likely to be a problem faced by smart/nerdy kids going to public school in and around Northampton, MA than it is in most other parts of the United States.
I say this as someone who didn’t go to elementary or middle school in America but who is pretty familiar with the demographics of the Northampton area (I went to college/lived in nearby Amherst for four years).
ETA: On further consideration, this comment is a little pointless and non-responsive to the interesting issues raised in the parent comment. I’m retracting it.
I went to public school, I tutor kids from a selection of of public schools, all of my best friends were nerds in public school, and besides which, I read that article before I even started to participate on Less Wrong. If that’s the most charitable reading you can take, I think you’re either not making an effort, or you have an emotional investment in this issue which you’re unable to separate yourself from.
Is this supposed to be a euphemism for getting punched by bullies?
No, and I think that would take a very uncharitable reading of my comment.
“Being punched by bullies” was one of the more common social interactions I had during my three years of middle school.
My suggestion, if that ever becomes the problem, would be to have the victim carry a concealed tape recorder and get the entire (verbal) portion on tape, including as much of a narration of the events as possible (“Why are you blocking me from going down this hallway?”). Armed with that recording, the guardian needs to confront the school officials and demand that effective measures be taken, or the media will become involved.
In my experience, the school administration either ignored stronger evidence or took actions which were ineffective; I never actually involved criminal court, although I should have, but I expect that they will decline to prosecute as well. The media, however, would love something like such a recording, combined with a “think of the children” banner. Threatening the administration with such a fate should be enough motivation to make them stop looking like they are looking for a solution and start looking for a solution; in addition, they might accept reasonable suggestions.
Again, I don’t think that’s what’s happening in the OP, but I think it’s important enough that anybody who has that kind of problem find it wherever they search; the low probability that my target audience is ever going to see this particular post is accounted for.
I’d urge people to think very, very carefully before going to the media in this sort of situation.
The media’s agenda is not yours: it’s to create as much interest as possible. Sure, you might get a media outlet interested in publicising wrongdoing: that might make a good story. But other outlets (or even the same one later when the initial interest has faded) will be interested in ‘monstering’ the complainers: that might make a good story, too. The school administration and their friends will be highly motivated to help in this endeavour. If you make a sufficiently large splash, every detail of your and the child’s life will be raked over for something that can be distorted to appear scandalous or wrong.
Almost nobody likes whistleblowers, and they (almost?) never prosper afterwards, regardless of the merits of their case. (I think this is a big problem for society, but hard to resolve.)
If the school administration is so committed to not seeing the problem, I’d expect that it’ll be more in the child’s interests to take them out of that school than it is to go to the media.
The hope is that the threat alone will suffice. We now enter decision theory territory when we ask if the threat becomes less credible if the follow-through is not performed.
In the abstract, general, idealized case where the threat fails, I would consider switching schools (to actually solve the problem) AND leaking the story to the media (partially out of spite, partially to provide an impetus for change benefiting others, and partially to maintain the credibility of one’s threats). In any actualized scenario, my advice might differ.
This sounds like a possible viable way of dealing with bullying, but in general, I think that if the children bring the bullying to their parents’ attention, and the parents are willing to intercede and make a serious effort on the kids’ behalf, bullying is usually solvable. It’s when adults insist that kids “need to learn to work these matters out among themselves” that troubles become intractable, and since I became an adult myself, I have on a few occasions had to remind adults that the way it works in the grown up world is that we have authorities we call on to intervene in conflicts because we don’t expect victims to be able to resolve matters amicably with their victimizers.
Also, one important step is that the parents must believe the child’s report of bullying. As opposed to e.g. thinking “this is an exaggerated version of something that is probably harmless”. (This was a mistake my parents were making all the time.)
Quick, what are your thoughts on the concept of rape culture?
Give me a reasonable definition, and I’ll give you my opinion. Without at least an approximate definition I try not to have opinion on things.
(Not that I couldn’t imagine some definition myself, but what’s the point if your definition may be something very different? I think rape is a bad thing, should be punished, and should not be made fun of. That includes also rape in prisons, or when a woman rapes a man, et cetera. On the other hand, I consider rape to be in average less serious crime than murder. Please note that this answer does not include the “culture” part, because that’s the part I don’t have a reasonable definition for.)
Oh! It’s ok, it sounds like you’ve simply never heard it explained. In a nutshell, my analogy here is that women in grown-up society who suffer some kind of sexual violation or threat are overwhelmingly likely to meet the same blind/wilfully ignorant/worse-than-useless response that is typical of adults overlooking bullying. (It sounds like you and me both have suffered from the latter.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_culture
So yes, this is not all of what feminists usually mean by these words - but they often do bring up such attitudes in the same vein as your description of bullying here. Given that you’ve previously decried some stereotypical “social justice” issues, including anti-sexist activism, as pointless/dishonest/hypocritical (IIRC), I wanted to point out how, this time around, you’ve independently echoed a popular feminist talking point.[1]
Here’s another analogy, with a widely used contrast of robbery vs. sexual assault:
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2007/01/03/the-rape-of-mr-smith/#comment-80958
“So you’d been drinking. Are you sure you didn’t tell him he could take the money? You know, maybe you were feeling sorry for him, feeling bad about telling him you weren’t going to lend him money any more… Are you sure you didn’t give him one last bundle of cash, out of sympathy, but maybe you’re feeling bad about it today?”
“Hey-”
“Maybe you’d had a few too many and it’s all a bit hazy? Are you sure you didn’t tell him he could have the money, but you can’t remember it?”
“No! He stole it from me-”
“What were you wearing at the time, Mr. Smith?”
“Let’s see. A suit. Yes, a suit.”
“An expensive suit?”
“Well–yes.”
“In other words, Mr. Smith, you were alone and drunk late at night with someone you had previously given money to in a suit that practically advertised the fact that you had money, isn’t that so?”
Etc, etc. Disturbingly familiar in some regards, isn’t it?
[1] Sure, a bit passive-aggressive of me… but at least I’m trying to achieve something rationalist here by pointing out that your beliefs appear not to be at reflective equilibrium.
We didn’t have a political thread on LW for a long time, did we? Would be a more appropriate place for this discussion. On one hand, I do not want to ignore your question, on the other hand, I have no desire to make this a long off-topic thread. Unfortunately, political topics are usually heavily mindkilling, they have thousands of connotations, so unless one writes a full book about the topic, there are many ways to misinterpret their answer.
Here are a few things that would deserve a longer discussion, but I don’t want to have all of those discussions right here and right now:
1) Just because a word is used, even if it has its page on wikipedia, does not mean the concept is well-defined. To quote from the wikipedia page: “there is disagreement over what defines a rape culture and to what degree a given society meets the criteria to be considered a rape culture”. What I am trying to say is that I agree that rape is bad, and I also agree that if you write a victim’s report on a web page, you will find many comments blaming the victim. I agree with this completely. The part that I don’t know (and wikipedia says there is no consensus even among people who use the word frequently) is whether this deserves to be called “culture”, and whether that means that only some people have this “culture”, or the whole culture is guilty of having this “culture”. And I have no desire to spend my afternoon having a discussion about definitions. I am willing to talk only about things that somehow translate to expected experience.
2) You speak about “overwhelmingly likely [stupid] response”, but I think that the topic of rape has no monopoly on that. In general, people are idiots. Do you expect them to stop being idiots specifically when discussing rape? I guess this website is all about the hundred mistakes people make when they think. And that’s just about thinking, because that’s what we are obsessed with; we speak about how stupid people are even when they try to be nice, polite, and reasonable. But many people don’t even try. I don’t expect people in general to have reasonable opinions about rape, just like I don’t expect them to have reasonable opinions about anything. Some of them even talk with their invisible friends, for God’s sake! I share your pain; I too wish people would be more reasonable. But today, they are not. That’s not about rape, that’s about… everything. The only exception is when people are massively brainwashed into believing something that coincidentally happens to be correct. This is why most people will give you a correct answer for “how much is 2+2″. So, expending a similar amount of energy, you could brainwash them into having the kind of reaction about rape that you want them to have. Even then, they wouldn’t have that reaction because it’s the smart reaction; they would have it, because it would be what they were brainwashed to believe. It would probably be a good thing. The problem is on the meta level; just as you can brainwash people into believing good things, you can brainwash them into believing bad things. So there is a kind of Schelling point of not brainwashing people too much, even for a good thing. I don’t have a full utilitarian analysis of consequences of breaking this Schelling point.
3) What is the overwhelmingly likely response, depends on what kind of people you interact with. Some people would have this reaction, other people wouldn’t. This is what makes me uncertain about generalizations about a culture. Who specifically is this culture? Which specific subgroup? How many people must exhibit some behavior so we can label the whole culture as a rape culture? Is it about number of people, or rather about what appears in media, or...?
4) When you say something reasonable, it is likely that at least some feminist agrees with it, and at least one feminist disagrees with it. Feminists say a lot of things. Some of them consider prison rape or woman-on-man rape an issue. Some of them don’t. I was specific about my opinion. I am not sure whether majority of feminists agree with this variant, and I don’t consider that information relevant.
5) Whether something should or shouldn’t happen, and whether some behaviors are more risky than others, those are two differently questions. Misinterpreting opinions about one of them as opinions about the other, that’s just one of many rhetorical tricks frequently used in political discussions.
6..99) Really, we could talk about it the whole afternoon.
100) Speaking about an anology with bullying, I think that: a) bullying is morally wrong and bullies should be punished; b) some actions can make bullying less likely, and it would be good to tell the victims about it. And no, whichever of the thousand connotations anyone thinks about immediately after reading this, if I didn’t write it explicitly, there is a chance I didn’t mean it.
Upvoted for making this specific distinction explicit. I think it’s important to note that A and B are not contradictory and should not be treated as if B->!A
Also upvoted the parent; the failure mode it describes is real, whether or not one subscribes to “rape culture” with the quotes.
One has to be careful not to let this devolve into a “we had to destroy this village to save it” scenario. It is possible to win the battle and lose the war, that is, completely screw up the kid’s social life for the rest of his time in this school.
It’s hard to give generic recommendations, it all depends on particular circumstances. Obviously there is a balance to be struck between helicopter parenting and “as long as he’s not in a hospital it’s all fine”. In some cases it’s better to let the kid handle it himself, in some cases it’s better to go to the administration, in some cases it’s better to switch schools.
My intention isn’t to create a typical social interaction where none currently exists. My intention is to prevent non-aggressors from feeling like the only course of action is to become an aggressor, and the general-case solution to that problem requires an appeal to the social systems set in place for that purpose.
How about teaching the kid to handle it himself, as in “okay let’s analyze this situation together and come up with some creative solutions”? That would be my first choice; get the kid to practice something like rejection theory for standing up to bullies or something like that, or practice martial arts, or invite “potential allies” out to Disneyland or I dunno, my kid isn’t getting bullied yet (that I know of).
Provided the kid can.
The “traditional” way of stopping bullying is quite painful. It essentially involves treating the bully as a Skinnerian rat and hurting him every time he attacks you. You pay a high price in pain yourself, but if, basically, every time the bully hassles you he gets kicked in the balls, pretty soon he’ll stop hassling you even if each time he “prevailed” and beat you up.
Other usual ways are to use social skills (which are usually lacking) and/or bulk up / learn effective fighting.
Of course that all presupposes physical aggression and boys.
Girls tend to go for passive-aggressive emotional attacks which can be harder to deal with.
Boys will do the passive-aggressive thing if they think they can’t take you physically. I had that experience growing up; I was too big to beat up but too socially inept to handle other forms of bullying. School was hell.
Did you try punching people who dissed you? That works for some people. Especially if they practice their skill at recognising the effective ways to deploy the power.
On a couple of occasions, I did. Trouble was, I was sufficiently clueless that the people who were inclined to wind me up also managed to direct my ire towards third parties who didn’t deserve it. “Let’s you and him fight,” more or less. Those were not shining moments in my moral life, although some bits of them do make funny stories twenty years later.
I have this mental list of people to locate if and when the government collapses sufficiently that law enforcement closes up shop....
Eh, it can be quite painful, but you just need to reach the point where bullying someone else is less of a hassle.
The rejection therapy and the Disneyland solution might still work here. Though in that case I’d look for advice from girls; I’ll get to that if I have a daughter AND she gets bullied; no hurry :)
Kind of a late reply on this one, but I’ll point out that this depends on what kind of bully you’re dealing with. Not all bullies are opportunists or cowards, and in particular some are playing a dominance game which they will not permit themselves to lose. To respond to a challenge by changing targets would be to implicitly acknowledge that they don’t have dominance over their original target, something they’re unwilling to accept, so they’ll respond to challenges by escalating until one side is unable to keep up. This is the kind of case where getting outside intervention is usually the most necessary.
Or take the Ender route and kill the aggressor. That sure stops the bullying, but it fits ‘destroy the village to save it’.
Some children commit suicide because of bullying. If those children instead killed their bullies, I think it would be a net improvement for the society. It would prevent those bullies to do the same with more children, and it would send a message that bullying is dangerous for both sides.
More cynically, it would motivate schools to investigate the cases of bullying when the bully is a popular person and the victim is low-status. We don’t want popular people to be killed, do we?
I think you made the assumption that each suicide would kill only one bully.
Even if it isn’t true, I’m inclined to agree that it would be a net improvement, but it would be on the opposite side of the maximum of the curve with ‘strength of response’ as the independent variable and ‘desirability of outcome’ as the dependent.
I don’t think this is an optimal or especially good way of dealing with bullies unless the bullying is so serious that it is a threat to the child’s safety. It encourages a habit of appealing to the authorities whenever things are suboptimal, instead of developing interpersonal skills to deal with the problem without an authority. It teaches the child to depend on authorities to save them when things aren’t going his/her way.
In my school at least, being a “snitch” had serious social consequences. They were despised, and often bullied more, and more furtively. Someone who can stand up to a bully, on the other, was seen as brave, as a leader.
Also, there are certainly authorities who sometimes offer help in the adult world (as Desrtopa notes) but often an appeal to an authority is difficult or impossible. What do you do if a coworker verbally bullies you? Or an in-law gets nasty? A friend of friend?
Blackmailing authorities by a smart plot that involves having a evidence that you can take to the media isn’t “being dependent on the authorities”.
It’s the HPMOR way ;)
You know, this environment is probably as close to the Hobbesian state of nature as it gets in modern first world countries. The solution to that has traditionally been for society to create a government to hold over itself, a leviathan able to be applied to. Thus, violence is curbed, by the threat of intervention by the overseeing power.
As in the world, so in this microsim.
Is this a desirable state? As someone who leans more towards the libertarian side of things, I think the answer is no. But despite that, there are two very valid points. The first is that like it or not, this is how the world is. You can try to set up an alternate system of governance, but if you play in a certain society, you play by their rules. Or overthrow them and institute your own rules, but that is a task of much greater scope.
Second, there has to be some rules. Life in the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short, after all. In the “state of middle school”, it’s not short, but it’s pretty nasty and brutish. This problem has to be overcome somehow, and the established way to do it is by government, that is to say in this case by authority figures. Have you got a better way? Many libertarians over the years have tried to hammer out alternatives, but as of now it’s still an open problem.
If you add that middle school lasts for three or four years, and after that most people are no longer in middle school, I think ‘short’ applies.
I wish that there was a well-documented way to apply the ideals of libertarianism in a manner that had effective results; I don’t see such a option.
Not to one’s subjective experience. Oh no.
Okay, why I think this is a bad idea:
1) It teaches the child that power is in the hands of bad guys and authorities.
2) It is a strategy that is dependent on having a genuine authority that is sympathetic to one’s cause (which may not always be true).
3) It is unlikely to directly teach the bully a better way to behave, and is likely to get him/her in a lot of trouble that might affect the rest of the bully’s life, especially if his/her identity is revealed (especially ethically problematic with a young child).
4) A person, especially a child, might misunderstand a situation. The “bully” might be reacting to something offensive or hurtful that the child did. If someone goes to authorities before attempting to resolve the problem quietly, s/he risks getting the “bully” unjustly punished, and not learning about his/her own inappropriate behavior. This one is especially important, IMO.
5) If the bully is a bullying a lot of people, gathering those people together and having them unite against a bully may simultaneously allow many people to feel like they and their community has power outside what an authority grants them (this seems like a more HPMOR-type of solution to me).
6) Once something reaches the mass media, you lose all control over the outcome. Your school administrator or dean or principal might be replaced (which may or may not be a bad thing). The bully could be sent to juvie or removed from his/her family or whatever.
7) You don’t know the full context behind the event. Maybe the bully just suffered a traumatic or tragic event. Maybe s/he has a mental disorder. Sure, then s/he needs help, and the authority should help him/her get it, but that approach seems lacking in the compassion due to the child in the midst of a tragedy.
8) You shame the bully and force him/her into a corner. The bully now loses face, especially if s/he backs down. With an especially impulsive person with little regard for his/her future, this could provoke some sort of desperate, especially violent response.
My suspicion is that libertarian practices would be (especially) bad amongst young children, who have lower impulse control and experience with self-organization.
In response to Villam_Bur, your extremely specific hypothetical in response to my comment reminds me of this. In response to that exact situation, I would attempt to use interpersonal skills, to get the support of my peers, examine my own behavior, ask for advice from others that I trusted, and try to understand the bully’s actions and figure out whether it was worth the effort and potential consequences of getting him/her to stop (seriously try all these strategies, not just give some perfunctory mental equivalent of a passing glance at trying). Then I would try physical force. If all of the above were unsatisfactory, I would have no qualms about bringing it to a trusted authority figure with good judgement.
I am curious: what kind of intepersonal skills (which don’t include using authorities) would you use to deal with a person who is three times as strong as you (and most of people around you), enjoys hurting you (physically), and makes it obvious to others that only you will be hurt (unless someone tries to defend you, in which case they will also be hurt, but it will be a one-time event for them)?
Depending on your answer, my second question would be: If such a situation happened to you tomorrow (and then every day) and you couldn’t avoid it, would you prefer to use only the interpersonal skill, or would you (also) use a threat of authority?
But why would you be singled out this way, and not some other small kid? The explanation probably involves interpersonal skills at some point (I would expect likelihood of being bullied to be more correlated with being weird and friendless and “a pushover” than it is with being weak).
Also, even a small kid should be able to bite really hard, or come up with something foul-smelling that sticks in the hair or something like that—but I don’t think either one of those are what is usually meant by “interpersonal skills” :)
Would it be too unrealistic scenario to imagine that I am a best student in the classroom, and the bully is the second best, but he used to be the best one in his previous school, he cannot emotionally accept not being first and when he cannot deal with competition in a fair way, he uses his physical strength as a backup option?
People can also hate you for being good at something, not just for being weak.
Yes, I used this kind of solution, and it worked. It just took me too much time to overcome the taboo about hurting other people (even in self-defense).
Learning to win fights despite a physical development disadvantage is exactly the wrong interpersonal skill to teach.
This does not seem like a claim that is universally true or obvious. If for whatever reason (such as bad judgement, incompetence at parenting or simply lack of resources) you choose to expose your child to one of the many environments where physical aggression is socially advantageous when they are at a physical disadvantage then it is neglectful to not also train them in at least the low hanging fruit with respect to succeeding in that environment.
To win one thousand fights in one thousand battles is not the skill you should be seeking. To resolve the confrontation favorably without fighting is the skill you should be teaching.
Either that, or firearm lessons. Biting and stinkbombs simply won’t work in environments where physical aggression is required, and there is no good reason for partial measures.
To avoid losing a thousand fights through the mere presence of a deterrent is a valuable and generalisable lesson. Finding ways to resolve confrontation without fighting is desirable but once again I have to point out that it is not always possible. Children do not get to choose whether or which school they are subjected to and so can not rely on the most important aspects of personal boundaries (those that follow from having the ability to choose situations). If they are forced into an environment where pacifism is a suboptimal survival strategy then forcing pacifism on them for ideological reason is adding insult to injury. Or adding more injury and permanent psychological damage to injury as the case may be.
Taking firearms to school is frowned upon. At least it is in my country, I can’t speak for anywhere else. I also haven’t ever seen either biting or stinkbombs advocated as an optimal fighting strategy for humans.
Yes there are. There is a reason not all wars consist of total nuclear obliteration in the opening day of conflict. There is also a reason why comparatively few physical conflicts between individuals, including individuals confined to schoolyards, are fights to the death.
“environments where physical aggression is socially advantageous” are frowned upon as well. If the people who frown upon violence in the school don’t take effective measures to address moderate violence, then they might take effective measures to address serious violence.
I think we might be talking about different things; I’m not addressing social posturing. I’m addressing things which would be felonies and treated as such if done openly by one adult to another: If someone punches me in the stomach and demands cash or he will do it again, why should age or the amount of money involved be deciding?
Fights are to lesser stakes than annihilation because the outcome is typically less important than existence to both parties. I’m not sure why the minimum required deterrent is better than the maximum possible deterrent.
That said, using weapons that are less likely to attract as much attention from an incompetent school administration while still being sufficient have a cost advantage. I suggest things which are also legitimate educational supplies, like metal or metal-edged rulers, if low-social-cost weapons are desired. As with any weapon, learn to use it effectively before you use it.
That is as it should be. But you do not fix this problem by crippling the victims and still not giving them a way out.
Those things certainly should be illegal and treated as such. Authorities who control such environments and who permit such behaviour are collectively evil. But it is also abhorrent to me to cripple the victims with idealistic morality that doesn’t work in the world in which they live.
You’re trying to change the world so as to make one person not be bullied. I’m trying to change the world such that fewer people are bullied.
It bothers me a little bit that our responses both make sense in context but are so different.
Is it? I agree it’s probably not the best, but is it worse than having the kid learn that he sucks, that the world is a nasty, unfair place, and that there’s nothing he can do about it?
I’ll grant that in some cases it might be superior to no intervention, or to teaching acceptance.
So, do you advocate Ender’s solution?
Thankfully, bullying has not been a problem for him.
My model says that “being punched by bullies” is much less likely to be a problem faced by smart/nerdy kids going to public school in and around Northampton, MA than it is in most other parts of the United States.
I say this as someone who didn’t go to elementary or middle school in America but who is pretty familiar with the demographics of the Northampton area (I went to college/lived in nearby Amherst for four years).
ETA: On further consideration, this comment is a little pointless and non-responsive to the interesting issues raised in the parent comment. I’m retracting it.
Ok, frankly the most charitable reading I can make of your comment is that you have no idea what typical social iterations in public schools are like.
I went to public school, I tutor kids from a selection of of public schools, all of my best friends were nerds in public school, and besides which, I read that article before I even started to participate on Less Wrong. If that’s the most charitable reading you can take, I think you’re either not making an effort, or you have an emotional investment in this issue which you’re unable to separate yourself from.
Sometimes it’s a euphemism for getting bullied (a good bit of bullying is emotional rather than physical attacks), sometimes it isn’t.
In any case, homeschooling parents frequently make efforts for their kids to have a social life, and this can work very well.