B19 wrote:
I am definitely in that generation. Alas we didn't have the freedom to go about our days and be protected from bullies. I well recall being burnt with a soldering iron, having my mouth held open while someone spat in it, having stones thrown at my eyes, being punched in the stomach and having my arm twisted up my back, hit over the head with a piece of wood, having lit fireworks thrown at me...
None of that cruelty and evil advanced my life, my character nor my interests - the lack of safety from bullies at school, on the way to and from school and at home only taught me what an incredibly unsafe world I existed in. The school bullies started when I was 8; at 11, I tried to starve myself to death as there was not one single safe adult to offer protection, and that was the only way I could think of at the time. Pain day in day out, week in week out, month in month out, year in year out - every single nanosecond was destructive to my well-being and the time and effort spent recovering from trauma stole subsequent years away from other things which would have been positive - so the bullies actually stole time from my later life too. How is that positive exactly?? I seem to be missing your moral points about how it was supposed to be so good for me..
Freedom? Character building? I can't relate to those ideas in any way whatsoever - the success in my later life was in spite of the bullies and the bystanders who did nothing, not because of them. It is grossly offensive to suggest that I succeeded in life because of those brutal bullies who tortured me because they could, for their pleasure. The apologist view taken to its greatest absurdity would be that the Holocaust "built character" in the survivors - same kind of argument taken to the ultimate offensive extreme. Except that in the case of the victims and survivors of the bullies I remember, there was never any justice for the victims, no safe country to go to, no acknowledgment by the adults who looked the other way and let it happen.
I built my own character, and for anyone else to try to apportion credit for that to those brutal cowards offends me so deeply that I lack the words to express the repugnance I feel.
Ummm.....were you replying to my post? Or to the original article? I can only assume it was mine because I was the only person to mention the word freedom.
I'm sorry you had to go through all that - and no, it's not not character building.
And yeah, all credible research suggests that bullying has dramatically negative effects on both mental and physical health. Also, I doubt it's healthy for kids to grow up as bullies either.
I hope you don't think I agree with the original article. What I was trying to point out was the structural inequality between one person and a group. It's like people who think they are not benefiting from racism because they themselves are not racist - and completely missing the point that they receive privileges other people are not given. In the same way, for ex. teachers who try to mediate between a group of bullies can fall into the trap of assuming that both parties are equal.
I was perhaps wrong to talk about it as an age thing. I had a lot of physical freedom in my childhood, and my parents even more - my mother used to run away by going for long walks. It's perhaps more a question of living in a rural setting, not village style. In my head all older people are from the countryside, I realize that is a huge generalization. I'm sorry I managed to trigger all your worst feelings. Obviously, your experience was quite different. What I was thinking of was more along the lines of what Cynthia Kim and Iris Johansson were describing about their childhood - having somewhere to escape to, to calm down, be safe from bullies and have one's own private world. This seems to be something you never had. I had that, and I think it mitigated some of the negative effects of being trapped in a negative school environment day in and day out.
I always felt more safe with older teachers because they didn't allow any shenanigans in the classroom. Again, these things can be so random; the kind of family a child grows up in, local culture, socio-economic factors, and so forth. I'd say, though, that the more violence there is in a community in general, the worse it gets for those who deviate from the norm.
If it was my post you reacted to, I apologize for my poor understanding. I can assure you that I think the original article is a load of bull, probably written to provoke people and increase clicks, so that this woman can get attention from gullible parents.
15 Oct 2015, 12:17 am
