Were you Bullied? Tell stories

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I got suspended from school about once a month for fighting. I never backed down from a bully. Probably should have a few times though.

No, it's not that simple. No-one exists in a vacuum. Unless these people are living on an island by themselves, they need to understand how they come off and work on it. Human nature makes us react to certain things, certain behaviors in certain ways. When someone acts very weird, people will at least exchange glances and quite a few will be likely to laugh or comment. I remember how weird (and scary) a classmate and I thought a woman in the neighborhood was. She had CP and we couldn't help but stare when we saw her and when we were safely past her, we'd giggle. Likewise, when I was 10 I acted really weird. There were reasons for it that made sense to me (I had hit puberty and felt traumatized. Yes. Really.), but I'm not getting into that. Suffice to say, I acted out in strange ways and said strange things, and naturally I was bullied for it. In retrospect I can't believe I got that easily away with it, because there was nothing normal about the way I acted. I was never one to care about words so I got off easily, since the physical stuff was scary but never got serious. In grades 1-3, when I acted normal, I wasn't bullied. In grades 5+, again when I started acting normal again, I wasn't bullied. I was responsible for acting in that way.

In the same way, people will find it fun to make comments to people who are easily set off. Two good examples:
When I was 11, a classmate and I had fun setting off a younger boy, It took nothing to make him go nuclear and we got him in trouble by just saying hi to him and grin. Obviously if the boy had just ignored us and not gone nuclear, it wouldn't be fun for us.
In the same way, my mother has a colleague who loves one particular soccer team. When they lose, he gets really worked up about it. So when they do lose some of his coworkers will mention the match and he'll go mad and yell about "stupid referees" and agitated go on about why it happened. He'll work himself up every time they do. It's incredible to me that a grown up man will be so infantile. How can he fail to see how that makes it fun to tease him? If he had just laughed it off or not cared, they wouldn't do it. One of the others had put on a T.shirt for a soccer team this guys hates and gone up to him and asked if he liked his new shirt. He'd gone sour and said that it was the ugliest thing he'd ever seen. He wasn't even kidding. Just hearing it retold made me laugh. There must be something wrong with him. It's not normal for an adult to have such a reaction.
If you dislike teasing, don't make it fun to tease you. (Alternatively, you can show you have a sense of humor and laugh it off). I've always liked teasing and bantering, it's fun. It's not everyone's cup of tea though, so if you're not into it, don't trigger those points.

If you're bullied (and I'm assuming we're not talking about serious physical stuff; that would be a criminal offence), you do have the power to deal with it, like Max000 said.
If you start crying, you show yourself as weak and people will look down on you. If you get mad, you participate in escalating things because you tell them that they're your enemy.

I really wish every child who is bullied could read "Bullies to buddies", because it works!

there is NEVER ANY EXCUSE for bullying!

I think this right here discredits your entire argument. You engaged in bullying and apparently see nothing wrong with it. No point in discussion at this point, because you're just going to defend the antisocial behavior that you engaged in. You're even making it his fault for being set off easily, even though you and your classmate deliberately chose to set him off as often as possible. This also explains why you've tried to dismiss bullying as "harmless pranking" in the past.

Also, much of your post involves more victim-blaming toward targets of bullying, even though people do not choose to be bullied, others instead choose to bully them.

All you're doing is offering excuses and rationalization as to why you think bullying isn't a bad thing. I strongly suggest doing some research about the effects of trauma and especially what can cause it. Something does not need to be physically violent to also be harmful. Because right now? You're coming off as part of the problem.

As a counterexample to the above quoted paragraph, when I discover that something sets a person off, I usually apologize for setting them off and then I stop doing it. Generally speaking, trying to make your victims responsible for your behavior is an antisocial feature that is not actually typical of all people, and as an example of the kind of people it is typical for, it is extremely common for psychopaths and sociopaths to use that kind of reasoning to disclaim any responsibility for their own actions or the harm they cause to others.

Last edited by Verdandi on 11 Jun 2013, 1:12 am, edited 2 times in total.

This isn't the first time Skilpadde's tried to argue that bullying is innocent, appropriate and harmless.

I was fairly severely bullied from mid Primary through to mid Highschool. Like most here I can't think of any one event that stood out. School basically sucked big time.

I was quite high functioning but was quiet and preferred my own company. Kids at school scan the classroom and school yard looking for weaknesses to pounce upon. It's very Darwinian, I was able to keep to myself by upper highschool and avoided contact by studying in the library.

I sorta learned to hide in plain sight.

Almost every day at school until about the age of 14 when it became frequent or often not every day.
I cannot describe how much I hated school.

I'm pretty sure my reaction to this book as a child would have been the same as it is now. That reaction would be "why would I even want to be friends with those abusive jerks?"

I was bullied a lot in school and it ruined my life. The only way I knew how to deal with it was to skip school which led to going to family court for truancy and getting sent away multiple times.

I was bullied in middle school. It was a suburban public school and compared to other schools I attended it was just a rough school. I remember a boy who sat behind me who would pull a single strand of my hair out and pretend he didn't do anything when I turned around. He also shot spitballs at the back of my head and even put gum in my hair once. One day he agitated me enough that before I realized it I had swung around and hit him. That was it, he never harassed me again.

I remember my mom coming in to school to talk to a guidance counselor about this one girl who harassed me a lot but I can't specifically remember any particular episodes. I think she must have just said mean stuff to me. I wore glasses so that didn't help. I was one of those kids who got tripped while carrying their tray in the lunchroom. I remember there being only one girl who welcomed me to sit with her at lunch. If she was absent her other friends she normally sat with would run me off and I'd have to eat alone. We had to do a sewing project for a mandatory home ec class. When I was out for a couple days for a family trip the other students in the class threw my project out the window. I only know this because the teacher informed me after I had searched all over the classroom for it. Not that the teacher did anything to stop them, discipline them, or even retrieve my project. I noticed a general apathy among the faculty there.

A neighborhood bully tried to take my new bike from me at the park. I was pushing it and when I refused to give it to her she climbed onto the frame to try to stop me from getting away. I didn't stop so she fell on her butt on the basketball court. I kept walking and the next thing I knew she tackled me and was hitting me. I think her friends pulled her off me. I just got up and got my bike and kept walking away while she was yelling at me. I don't think she ever bothered me again.

In 9th grade my family moved to a rural area and the kids there were much nicer. I only remember one girl who gave me any trouble.

Ugh. I was bullied all the time until High School but it was only unbearable in Junior High. Pretty much everything was done to me and I will try to only mention the milder things:
*Had a kid in elementary take all my belongings and throw them in a mud puddle.
*While I have no proof who did it I got severe Mono in school despite the fact I never shared anything with anyone for any reason. Nobody I knew had the disease but doctors said I must have kissed or shared something at school.
*Ended up with two concussions by being shoved down stairs and being slammed into a locker from behind head first, both by "nerds" looking to be popular.
*Had some morbidly obese ugly girl offer to pay me $50 if I left the class to a round of cheers.
*In sports my own teams cheered when I failed
*Was assaulted so much that I was covered from head to toe in bruises
*Had my pants pulled down and privates grabbed by the same guys who would beat someone half to death for saying they were homosexual.
Of course no matter who I reported it to it was either downplayed or I was told that this happens to everybody.

I also second that ignoring doesn't work. I ignored until I snapped emotionally and that ramped up the attacks. My the time I realize that these bullies simply didn't care and won't respond to reason it was too late because 10-15 were bullying me at once. Funny how once they turn 18 these "boys will be boys" acts suddenly become serious criminal offences.

They were looking for a reaction from you. Don't give it, and they will get bored.

I hate to use an old adage, but...

Sticks and stones will break my bones
But words will never harm me.

That one has been around since before 1862. This is not like a new problem, or something.

The just ignore them and don't react advice never worked for me. Neither did fighting back. All I could do was skip school to avoid them.

Exactly, advice to fight back is tough talk. Sounds good, feels good, but doesn't really accomplish anything. Unless you just like to fight. In that case go for it.

Bullies taught me how stupid it is to tell them you don’t let them take your stuff and do whatever they want with it when they haven’t asked for your permission in the first place. I never grasped the idea that might makes right till it was horribly late in my life, so I used to think naïvely that not having asked for your permission left them at fault and they should be ashamed. Only the distinct pride and self-confidence in a classmate much bigger and stockier than me when he asked me shouting, for the second time (I didn’t get his true meanig at first, which all too justly irritated him), whether he had asked for my permission to grab a set square of mine and hurl it at the ceiling to see if it’d get stuck there, made me start glimpsing the truth.

Nobody was nearly as strong as him, and he was quite fond of finding targets to pick on, but I probably deserved it, because I once joined a group which was making fun of him, in a stupid attempt to fit in. He got way past even, though, bullying me now and then for a significant part of that year. Then his interest in me faded, as he found other targets, and I became very concerned about my trouble interacting with people and tried my best to behave properly. I didn’t really succeed, as I kept making deeply embarrassing aspie blunders, but at least I avoided consciously promoting a bullying environment myself, and, while I didn’t make any true friends, people began to consider me too good-natured to deserve bullying. Yes, I know this probably wouldn’t happen had I been exposed to an actually nasty environment, so I was lucky.

It took me a lot of years to understand both parts of the story as clearly as I see them now. I really miss having received a little advice about a few fundamental things which are not inborn to us aspies, so I could start working from there to overcome my social limitations, rather than being clueless and wasting so many years stupidly, and some serious training for combat, so I wouldn’t always be at the mercy of others when things get physical. My parents and most teachers were never fond of Si vis pacem, para bellum, but they didn’t offer any alternatives, either. Now I firmly believe in that maxim, but it’s just part of the story. As someone pointed out on the Internet, if you strive for peace, it advises you to get ready for war; but what should you get ready for if you want war? War, obviously. So, no matter what you want, just get ready for war