Studies reveal why kids get bullied

Bullying prevention approaches that show the most promise confront the problem from many angles. They involve the entire school community—students, families, administrators, teachers, and staff such as bus drivers, nurses, cafeteria and front office staff—in creating a culture of respect. Zero tolerance and expulsion are not effective approaches.

Bystanders, or those who see bullying, can make a huge difference when they intervene on behalf of someone being bullied. Studies also have shown that adults can help prevent bullying by talking to children about bullying, encouraging them to do what they love, modeling kindness and respect, and seeking help. Bullying Statistics Here are federal statistics about bullying in the United States.

The following percentages of students ages had experienced bullying in various places at school: Hallway or stairwell An estimated Types of Bullying Students ages experienced various types of bullying, including: Being the subject of rumors or lies Low socioeconomic status is a main factor in youth bullying within wealthy countries.

And when kids aren't given any opportunity to not be proven an outcast by fighting back the only real way of dealing with it is with a good education system that puts kids who are similar together. Which, if it was done that way, I'd imagine there would be a lot less bullying in schools. I was fortunate enough that my parents decided it's a good idea to do just that and let me enjoy a "better" high school.

Guess what? Sure, our kind of bullies were the kind that would have gotten the snot beaten out of them by "real" bullies, but the void of the stupid, frustrated hardcore jocks was quickly filled by others who realized they have a physical edge over others. I got bullied in grade school, but I beat the shit out of them. Most of them avoided me, though a couple still pushed me around. I always got punished whether I was beaten or beating - "zero tolerance" and whatnot. Then I realized that since the consequences were the same or even substantially better!

Then they all avoided me. Despite fully growing into nerddom in high school, I had zero problems with bullying there. I'm not sure if preemptively mauling your abusers in high school is as effective a tactic once you factor in juvenile court and expulsion.

But, their files are still prone to deletion, their tires still prone to slashing, and their cars still prone to towing.

If you something that other kids have that they don't, you will be bullied, like having two working parents, or hope for the future and the motivation to want to learn and go on to college or university. There have reports of students being attacked and even committing suicide because they were successful in their work. Then the bullies would just. I would say it is because they are in an environment where they are being bullied.

You don't see that kind of shit in the workplace, at least not the in-your-face kind of thing: adults would never stand for it. It's weird how it is tolerated in a child's environment. I was naturally a nerd and would've continued down that path happily into a career as a scientist, but I had to become "cool" to fit in.

I know that I didn't really "have to" and that it was my choice, but I believe that an environment that was more conducive to the brighter students would have.

First year in high school I was bullied, struck back, and then was labeled as a hot head. Every other hot head considered me one of them and assumed the only way to solve disagreements with me was with violence. It took a while to shake that. I was never really bullied because i fought back early on, plus i'm a beefy guy to begin with so inspite of me being into computers no one bothered me. I think the number one thing teachers and parents need to do is let kids fight their own damn battles.

I know if my kids were getting picked on at school i wouldn't sit down and tell them to care and share, i send them to boxing lessons and tell them to defend themselfs. All these years I thought "turn the other cheek" meant you just put up with bullying. Then I read a sentence in this book by some Christian author I can't remember.

Anyways, he said "You can't turn the other cheek if it's been turned for you". There is a key distinction between meekness and weakness I was not understanding. Now that I have discovered that, it is my choice whether I choose to fight back or not.

I don't feel "morally obliged" to be passive. I evaluate whether it is important for me to defend myself at that moment, and I act on that. The real problem all along for me was a control issue. Now that I have that control, I realize the power struggle for what a silly thing it is, and it just doesn't bother me.

I also am much older now and these things just don't happen anymore. His daughter [2nd, 3rd grade or something] was being abused by the school bully. He contacted the teachers, several times about it, to no avail; after the girl was physically hurting his daughter.

He contacted the school principle, who didn't do anything, shrugged it off, not a big deal, etc. So he told his daughter, the next time this happens, grab her hair next to her scalp tightly, and push her head down as hard as you can while you pick your knee up right into her face. So he explained everything to his lawyer and had him write them a nastygram. They and the bully's parents shut up. I liked this story because 1. The bully never bothered his daughter again.

Neither did anyone else in school. Those members of the community aren't themselves individuals? The parents, siblings, friends, and other relatives of the victims had no 'psychology' in response to their loved ones being murdered? Perhaps the situation is the reverse of what you propose. Perhaps a culture of sacred violence has modified the basic human psychology of love, empathy and forgiveness. Perhaps both feelings of revenge and forgiveness are inherent. He's asking for evidence to justify your human psychology theory.

If you don't have any real evidence then fess up. It's not enough to give anecdotes that don't really address the issue. It's even worse to come up with some bizarre theory on his thought process that doesn't seem to amount to more than an ad hominem attack. That didn't stop it for me. One kid made fun of me so much I couldn't take it anymore. So I grabbed his hand, pulled him towards me and executed a perfect clothesline, knocking him to the ground.

I was a fan of wrestling at the time. It may be fake, but those moves - if properly pulled off - can hurt. The next group of kids who made fun of me were If I passed one of them in the hall, they wouldn't say anything, however if two or more of them were there, they'd tease me.

I read some accounts of kids being bullied these days, and their situation was pretty desperate because the bullies were members of gangs. Any violence in self defense or otherwise would be responded by a beating by one or more of the other bullies in the gang. How many other kids do you think tried that sort of thing, and got seven kinds of shit beaten out of them? And then got it worse afterwards for daring to stand up?

What happens when you get someone who is willing to risk an elbow to the throat? How about you try to think of a way of addressing this problem which doesn't hold the victim responsible for their own victimisation? There was a point after much bullying when I just snapped. Yet again I was shoved and pushed or something like that, my memory is remarkably hazy around that moment and I decided that one of us will die now.

Literally that. I was willing to stop it, and either way was acceptable. I don't know what happened exactly. In the end he lost three teeth, had the better part of his ribs broken and a concussion, while my knuckles were pretty much torn open. I'm really glad to see them taking a "help the kids function in the real world" vice the traditional "turn schools into a happy fantasy world" approach. At the same time, learning to deal with these kind of challenges on your own is important.

Obviously there are lots of cases where things get out of hand, and as the article describes, kids grow up with all sorts of problems as a result. I think the assumption here is that you are giving the kid a push in the right direction.. When you start doing the latter.. I think you just serve to isolate the kid more classic example.. It's cliche.. If you're a geek.. They do not get peer mediation, they dont get 3 day suspensions.

Police do not tell victims "Suck it up, be a man, stop living in a fantasy world", they arrest the thug and put him in jail for an extended period of time. They do not force victims to stay in proximity with their perpetrators. We do not tolerate it when husbands batter wives and when parents batter children, we dont allow thugs to extort money from people on city streets or to beat up people as a means of social dominance.

Why do we tolerate physical violence by peers? Sorry, but it does not work. Delude yourself all you want, but if you have kids, please try to review your view. Be yourself and you'll fit in.

Ignore the bullies and they get bored eventually. I know those words well. I was told them myself. They have no roots in reality, though. They're the feelgood words parents use to delude themselves and their kids in the vain hope that they can wish the problem aw.

Indeed it is. According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs [wikipedia. The article even ends with the appeasement of "what can you change about the way you act to avoid being bullied". Just like Battered Wife Syndrome, bullying is something that, ultimately, is the fault of the aggressor.

Appeasement is not the solution. Let me translate the article for you so you don't have to waste time on its bullshit: bullied kids are responsible for their own torment and it's really their job to stop it from happening.

Right in the ear. Studies Reveal Why People Get Beaten and Mugged The factors involve a persons inability to pick up on and respond to nonverbal cues from muggers. Studies Reveal Why People Get Prison Raped The factors involve a persons inability to pick up on and respond to nonverbal cues from rapists. Studies Reveal Why People Get Prison Murdered The factors involve a persons inability to pick up on and respond to nonverbal cues from murderers. A better analogy would be, "Studies Reveal Why People Get Beaten and Mugged: The factors involve walking alone through dark alleys in crime-ridden neighborhoods.

That's all this is. It isn't "blaming the victim" like so many people are shouting. It's simply a matter of identifying factors that increase the risk of becoming a victim and addressing those factors in order to reduce such risks.

I only wish this study had been done 40 years ago. I have Asperger's Syndrome only recently diagnosed and was bullied a lot as a kid.

If my parents had been armed with the information in this study, maybe I would have been bullied less. Seriously, though, how you act makes a huge difference to how likely you are to be mugged.

It's actually quite useful knowledge: the places to avoid, how to act if you're in a strange place, how to react when potential muggers interact with you to gauge how safe a target you are, what to do if you are being mugged e. It's fine to say "muggers are bad people" -- we know they are. But that doesn't get you far in the area of self-protection. Those poor bullies are really the victims of the kids they beat up, because the kids being beaten up are practically asking the bullies to commit violence against them.

I mean, obviously, if anybody doesn't want to conform to social norms or has interests other than those that the popular kids have, they are abnormal and hence need to be cured! Bullies don't have initially preferred targets, I bet they try to bully everybody, but they continue with people who don't fight back or don't know how to protect themselves, what are the chances that those people are the shy ones, the ones that don't get social clues, the ones that are a bit slower?

Do we need a study for that? The Santee rage massacre took place less than two years after Columbine, and this time, thanks in part to the pathetic figure of Andy Williams, people started to seriously consider the role bullying might have played.

But there was resistance. In the immediate aftermath, Santana High School officials and local law enforcement officials either denied growing reports that he was a victim of bullying, or else they argued that even if he had been bullied it had nothing to do with the shooting. Andy's appointed lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Randy Mize his father could not afford to hire a private attorney , listed eighteen incidents of bullying just in the weeks leading up to the shooting, including "burned with cigarette lighter on his neck every couple of weeks," "sprayed with hair spray and then lit with a lighter," "beat with a towel that caused welts by bullies at the pool," and "slammed against a tree twice because of rumors.

Jeff Williams, Andy's father, later said, "Some of the stuff basically borders on torture. As Andy quickly learned, Santana High's culture combined the lethal cruelty of coastal California suburbia with familiar, rural trailer park hazing. He wanted out.

He visited his mother in South Carolina a few months before his attack, and hoped to move back with her. When he visited old school friends in rural Maryland on that same trip, he told them that kids at his high school regularly egged his father's apartment or stole his homework and threw it into garbage bins.

They called him "faggot" and "bitch" and "gay" and taunted him for not fighting back when he was bullied. Worst of all, much of the abuse came from the neighborhood "friends" he hung out with, got stoned with he turned stoner to try to earn acceptance , and from whom he tried and failed to learn to become a skate rat. Some were students at the high school, some weren't. Andy's decision to hang out with students from another school, which suburban kids don't often do, in spite of the fact that these "friends" abused him at least as much as the Santana High "friends," says a lot about the choices he faced.

If Andy could have learned to skate, he might have been accepted by a second-tier clique in the coastal California public school hierarchy. As it was, not only did he never live up to the skate rat standards on the ramp, but to punish him for being a dork, his skateboard was stolen on at least two occasions by his friends, who then taunted him for being too much of a fag to protect his board. In spite of their relentless taunting, Andy joined them at the local skate park, where they got buzzed on liquor and weed, skated on the ramps he just watched , and tormented Andy Williams.

People called him freak, dork, nerd, stuff like that. Laura Kennamer, a friend, said, "They'd walk up to him and sock him in the face for no reason. He wouldn't do anything about it. Even Andy's fifty-nine-year-old, neighbor Jim Crider, observed, "Williams looked like someone working hard to fit in with his peers-and not quite succeeding.

His clothes did not match what the other kids were wearing. When he talked, others didn't always pay attention. Anthony Schneider, who was fifteen when the Santee shootings happened, both confirmed Crider's observation and gave a small glimpse into the dumb, cool poison of this schoolyard culture there: "He didn't have that. Uh, it's pretty clear to me that there is an overtone in this article that it's victim's fault that they are not well liked or have social problems. While I accept that this may be true in some cases, and a contributing factor in many instances, it's shocking and abhorrent to me that someone might suggest that it's the victim's fault that they get physically assaulted, mentally abused, pressured to do drugs, etc.

The common attribute to bullying is bullies. They are the source of the problem as often a single link in a chain of abuse and it would be wise to focus on identifying, exposing, and properly reacting to their abusive behavior against others. I don't want to attack the entire study based on my perception of this article, and I'll support that having poor social skills can contribute to the likelihood of being a bully victim, but WTF?

I think that you are missing the point of the article. If there is a certain set of traits that bullys prey on, isn't it wise to know what those traits are and then arm kids with those traits with the skills they need to not be a victim? I dunno, kinda seems like you didn't read the article. It leads with "The number one need of any human is to be liked by other humans", and keeps that chord going throughout.

A person who is rejected and has no friends is unhappy, whether he's bullied or not, and the focus in the article is rightly on that issue. If you focus on that part of the message, you see that there is indeed a problem that originates in the suffering child. You can't divide the world into "bullies" and "non-bullies" any more. It's "those who reject him" and "those who don't reject him", and for the kid suffering with no friends, nearly everyone is in the second group.

The normative behavior is to reject as alien those who do not respond to social cues. Will you blame the whole world for behaving normally, or try to teach the suffering kid how to break through the perception barrier and get accepted?

Regarding bullies: of course the bully's behavior is non-normative, and needs correction, but that's really the lesser part of the suffering of the lonely child. The greater part is the inability to make friends. I've lived a strange life. I was bullied from a very, very young age at school. I was also bullied by my older brother and his friends. After time, at school I became the bully. After about a year I switched schools. Once again, I was bullied. Within a year, I switched homerooms and the bullying stopped one class was full of completely malicious little shits and the other was full of people I would be friends with for a decade.

A few years later, a kid that had bullied me in the past came back to the school. I bullied him continuously. Then, I moved to another state and school.

I was bullied there for about two years. I went to another school and by then I had learned a few lessons. The bully in me was still there. But it had changed. Instead of bullying the weak, I enjoyed bullying the bullies. I treated the world as a hostile place.

Everyone that wasn't a friend was an enemy. Every affront was an act of war, and my typical response was escalation. You push me into a locker? Researchers found that bullies are more likely than their classmates to suffer from low self-esteem, depression, and behavioural problems from early childhood and through primary school.

They are more likely to suffer from mental health problems later in life too. The researchers argued that this absence of "true" bullies could be down to the social environment of primary schools, where children have less tolerance for power imbalances.

They then started mocking her appearance. Youngz says the relentless bullying, which continued through secondary school, had a knock-on effect in all areas of her life, and she took up smoking and drinking in an attempt to cope. Now aged 46, it is only in the past year that she has come to terms with the effect that the bullying had on her.

Her experience underlines a painful truth. Children, for all their innocence and inexperience of the world, can be some of the most vicious bullies.

Their actions, perhaps less hindered by the social norms we learn in later life, can be merciless, violent and shocking. And they can have life-long implications for the victims.

That picture is now changing. There are several definitive types of school bully that have been identified by psychologists Credit: Getty Images. It perhaps fails to capture the terrible toll it can have on victims or the complex reasons why people become bullies in the first place.

But one key element is the difference in power.