Bullying

I was listening to a radio interview this morning about bullying. Two experts were talking about what a poor job we do of dealing with bullying in the schools. I wonder, though, if the teachers and other adults don't do the right things, because they don't know how. Why do we assume that everyone has these interpersonal skills and are simply refusing to use them? I wouldn't know how to deal with bullying if I worked in a school. Even if I were really well-intended I wouldn't know what to do if confronted with a specific incident of bullying if it were happening in front of me. At least I wouldn't be able to handle it in a skillful way that would teach a more effective way of relating. I would be as confused and fearful as anyone confronted with a mean person.

Why do we assume that people who work in schools know how to handle these situations any better than anyone else? Where are these skills taught in our culture? Bullying seems to be the standard way we deal with one another in the world. Look at the comments after any news story on any newspaper's website. Mean mean mean. As if the other people out there have no feelings. And you can't just learn a set of rules to deal with these situations. You have to be able to tune in to the feelings of the bully and the bullied person and the witnesses. You can't teach that to school staff in a two day seminar.

Anyway my son was a victim of bullies in school for years. My current understanding of the roots of psychosis/schizophrenia is that it's based in trauma of some form. I do wonder if my son's negative experiences in school are at least a contributing factor in his current problems. He does seem to perceive attacks when I don't think an attack is intended.

On the other hand, maybe he was bullied because there's something in him bullies pick up on and cause them to target him? I remember talking to the parent of one bully when he was about 12. The mom (I'll call her Linda) seemed very concerned and admitted that at least one other child had complained that her son had bullied her. But then, Linda told me, that girl (I'll call her Anna) later attempted suicide. So Linda was wondering if there was just something wrong with Anna and maybe she had made up the story about being bullied or was just too sensitive? It didn't seem to occur to Linda that her son was targetting vulnerable children.

Somebody must be in charge, right?

Here is a different take on bullying:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...lying-industry

Very interesting, pachyderm.

This line jumped out at me:

My older (bio) son was bullied when he was in school. My younger (adopted) son bullied other children. The school's response was pathetic in both cases.

Appparently our local school district is importing some technique from some northern European country to deal with bullying. There was an article about it in the local paper a couple of months ago. One poster had a 4 step "solution" to bullying. One step, I remember, was "call the parents." Another was "call the police." I pointed out that calling me when my son bullied someone had no effect on him at all - although I certainly do think parents should be notified. And most bullying doesn't involve any actual crime, so why call the police?

My adopted son has some pretty serious behavioral and emotional problems. Standard parenting techniques seemed to have no effect on him at all. I think the trauma of his life and the pain of being separated from his mother at the age of 8 were very shaming experiences for him. When his anxiety level started to rise, he would act out. Then the school would punish him - which raised his anxiety level even more and made him escalate his negative behavior. One of the standard ways of punishing him was suspension - which keyed into his pathological fear of rejection. The best year he had in high school was the year he had a resource room teacher who genuinely liked him, welcomed him, enjoyed being with him. He felt accepted, his anxiety went down, and his behavior improved. He was never great, but he was better.

But as the article says, we love to hate bullies. So any suggestion that shame-inducing reactions to the bullying behavior will only breed more negative behavior is seen as not caring about the victims and as condoning the bully's behavior. I don't know what the answer is, but I do know the fear-based approaches I witnessed really suck.

I know some people might disagree with me, but I'd far rather be the mother of a compassionate sensitive human being who is bullied than of someone who is a bully. Bullies often have the same problems of anxiety and low self esteem that their victims do, but a bullying victim is often able to empathise with others, and behave in a compassionate way that makes the world a little better.

My son has been very severely bullied in his time, but he's decided that he wants to work in child care, particularly the early years, primary school teaching etc, since he wants to help little children have happy experiences rather than sad ones. To a certain extent his experience of being bullied has inspired him to do that.

I do think that bullying can have a devastating effect on people. I've been very badly bullied in my time, but I also remember one poor boy who I bullied, thinking it was okay because he'd picked on my brother. As an adult I've both been bullied and been the bully. Bullying hurts both bully and bullied, and I'm sure it has a profound impact on later mental health.

It's probably harder for the parent of a bully to help their child, since the whole system is geared up to protect the victim (completely necessary) and the emotional needs of the bully are ignored. One very good head teacher who I know did an assembly in which he confessed to having been a monstrous bully as a child. One of his victims came and talked about how that had made him feel, and the head teacher publically apologised to the man for his treatment of him in the past. This had a real impact on the children, and bullying incidents dropped precipitously after this, since kids had compassion not just for the victim, but the perpetrator.

I do think that sometimes bullying can involve an actual crime. My son had his cheek bone fractured in one incident, and another incident included a sexual (thank God non invasive) assault. The school didn't take these incidents seriously at all, and in the end I removed him from the school. His current school has dealt with the issues in a sensitive way, and things are far better than they used to be.

Sometimes, but usually not. Some really mean behaviors aren't illegal at all.

And when an actual crime has been committed, I'm not sure it's best to get the courts involved. My adopted son was considered to have a disability under U.S. law - the IDEA = Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. His disabilities were emotional (dx'd with reactive attachment disorder, PTSD, oppositional defiant disorder, and a mood disorder). Because he was covered by the IDEA, it was very difficult for the school to "get rid of" him. Unless he was shown to be very dangerous, they had to keep him in the school. As a result, when the school district wanted to expel a student they started a campaign of calling the resource officer in every time there was an incident with targeted special ed students, writing up police reports, and referring them to the district attorney for possible prosecution. This was the school's way of trying to skirt the IDEA and get rid of students with challenging behaviors. (I know this because the special ed teacher told me so.)

One day when he was 15 my son's resource room teacher allowed him to walk from one room to another during class time. He stopped to take a drink from a fountain. Another child came up behind him and playfully flicked his jacket at the side of his face. My son, who spent his first 8.5 years in a very violent home and is badly triggered by even a hint of aggression, reacted by turning around, chasing the other boy, and plowing his fist into his face, bloodying his nose.

The school reported it to the police and my son was prosecuted for battery. The other boy was also a special ed student with impulse control issues. His parents didn't want my son prosecuted, because they knew it could have as easily been the other way around - with my son as the victim and theirs as the perpetrator. The prosecutor "bullied" them by telling them their son had to testify against mine or he would be subpoenaed.

Net result: my son has a criminal record and no one learned a damned thing - except that the juvenile justice system is a joke but that's a different story.

If the school weren't motivated by a desire to circumvent federal law and get rid of my son, it would have been handled differently I believe.

P.S. My son has learned some self-control. He's 20 now and had an incident a couple of days ago which he managed to get out of without hitting someone who was deliberately trying to provoke him to attack her. He called me desperate for help, and I could hear this young woman taunting him, "Hit me, go on, you know you want to hit me." She was hoping he'd give her an excuse to have him arrested. She did call the police, hoping that would enrage him. I'm so proud he called me instead of lashing out with his fists. It gives me some hope that I actually helped him somewhat. But I didn't help him by being punative. The desire to punish, punish, punish drives boys with histories like my son's into further acts of aggression.

At one point, when he was about 16, he ended up in a residential "treatment" center. It was the saddest thing I ever saw in my whole life. A bunch of teenaged boys that no one could figure out what to do with, herded together in an awful collection of rundown buildings, given psychiatric labels and psychotropic meds. Dreadful! The kids who most need relationships and acceptance are the most rejected and marginalized.

I have this saved in my email from the days when I was working so hard to figure out how to help my younger son. There's a huge amount of wisdom in these few words. The kids who are the hardest to love need love the most.

@Costello

Wow, this thread has moved me a lot, in my heart.

I never grew up as an aggressive adolescent. I am 21 now.
I always internalized it, because I thought I deserved all of it.
I was bullied by immediate AND distant family members, as well as, best friends and people i did not know.

After I got about 18, It all changed in my mind. I could not take it anymore. I grew confidence in being aggressive and not passive. Being passive is what drove me to commit suicide a couple of times. I figured I didn't care what I had to lose if it meant i got to show someone a little something. I am scrawny. So I dont know how to fight. I figured i'd learn how to use a gun, etc. "Anything", I told myself, "anything, I dont care, anymore".

My aggression is still growing. Getting worse actually, but I realized that thats not who I want to be. I thought, before, that, thats what I NEEDED to be. I try not to be so aggressive now.

I've learned that when I get aggressive my anxiety is extremely high and it gets to the aggressive point when someone keeps pushing me after I say no, or if something/situation keeps pushing.

Thank you for this!

I'm glad you've found it helpful.

My older son went through something similar, I think, except he "changed" a bit younger. He was the target of bullies at school from kindergarten on. Then when he was about 9th grade he punched a couple different kids he said were picking on him. He told me that if you can look tough enough, you send the message that you're not to be messed with.

I'm glad that's not who you want to be. It's sad to me when gentle people feel the need to strike out in order to feel safe. IMO we need more gentle people in the world and fewer aggressive people.

Yes, I can see aspects of that in both of my sons. The younger one acts out aggressively when he's anxious. The thing is he never looks anxious. He just looks aggressive. And the things that make him anxious aren't as apparent to other people. His biggest fear is being abandoned. His birth mom relinguished him to the foster care system when he was 11, so he's always on the alert for being abandoned. Even the faintest hint that you're going to push him away, and he goes into hyperalert mood.

Right before Thanksgiving I texted him to ask if he was going to hang out with the family on the holiday. He lives with his gf's family, so I thought he might have plans with them. He texted back, "Do you want me?" It broke my heart that he'd even have to ask.

The fights my older son has gotten into have all been in situations where someone was crossing his boundaries and wouldn't respect him when he asked them repeatedly to stop. He simply doesn't know what to do. Also I think those situations maybe trigger him in a way and take him back to how it felt to be bullied and the need to put on a tough front.

I'm glad it was useful. Traumas of all kinds - including being bullied - can contribute to mental health problems.

I followed pachyderm's link to a website called bullies2buddies.com where they advocate using the Golden Rule to deal with bullies.

The True Meaning of the Golden Rule: Love Your Bullies

I wish I had known as a kid that making other kids feel small was a form of bullying... when a kid picked on me at school I would go home and stew about it, and then in future incidents I'd have a whole raft of sarcastic comebacks and put downs that were deliberately designed to make the bully feel small. Okay, I wouldn't walk up to them with the sarcastic comment, but if they said something that upset me I'd let rip, and I do know that this made several of those kids feel even more helpless and sorrowful than they already were.

Costello, I really hope that your son's juvenile record has been sealed. I don't know how it works in the US. In the UK schools try very hard not to criminalise kids, and I do know that my son has had great sympathy for some of the kids who victimised him when he heard a little bit about their backgrounds. My Dad works with so called "looked after children", kids in foster care etc... he is firmly of the opinion that there is not a bully who isn't also a victim, and that one of the huge tragedies is that these kids are seen as being as culpable as an adult offender.

In the UK if the victims family didn't want to press charges then the police would just leave it. It often scares me to read of the oppressive atmosphere that seems to prevail in certain areas of American life.

Hah, yep.

children can get tried as adults for very miniscule stuff

I read a recent story of a little five year old boy with ADHD who was arrested for assault PC (he freaked out when the officer touched him and kicked) and then cuffed by the wrists and ankles and taken by squad car to a psychiatric hospital for assesment. (The hospital basically confirmed that he was a frightened five year old kid and sent him home.) I cannot concieve of something like that happening in this country... though give it ten years and we will catch up. I'd be scared witless to bring up any child in the US, let alone a child with a neurological or psychological difference.

My older son spent an entire day a few weeks ago dredging up memories of times he'd said cutting things to other people and made them feel small. I think he's been made to feel small and weak so many times himself, that it bolstered his ego to remember times when he was the tough one. One memory he especially relished was something he'd said to someone he perceived as being very strong. When I got home from work, he told me about these three memories where he felt like he was the strong one. (Yes, only three mean comments, and none of those was actually very mean. My son's basically a nice guy.)

I was never bullied myself, so I guess I don't understand. When I think back on times I've hurt someone's feelings, I feel ashamed - like I want to crawl under a rock and hide.

Unfortunately in my state, juvenile crimes count on the adult sentencing grid. That makes no difference, of course, if you don't commit any crimes as an adult. But my son has - and probably will again. Luckily it's small stuff - shoplifting at WalMart two years ago and disturbing the peace about six months ago.

Indeed. My son has been repeatedly hurt in his life - physically and emotionally. He has a long scar down his face - starting under his left eye and going all the way down his cheek and across his mouth. It makes him look scarier than he is. (He's a black male which seems to automatically scare a lot of people anyway.) What people don't know is that he got that scar when he was 2. He was standing next to his mother when his step father attacked her, and he was knocked through a window. Collateral damage in a domestic violence incident.

And as a teen and young adult he has been the victim of attacks himself - which he never reports. Once in a juvenile detention center, he was cornered in the laundry room by two other boys and beaten up. He didn't mention it, but a sharp-eyed worker noticed the bumps and bruises through his hair and made him tell her what happened.

A month or so ago a girl tricked him into coming out to a house at 3 am by sending him text messages saying she was hungry, could he bring food. Thank God his gf's mom smelled a rat and insisted on going with him. She said he walked into the house, then came running out with 10 guys after him. As soon as they saw her in the van, they backed off.

My son has huge problems. He lies constantly, and he steals anything not nailed down, and he can't be faithful to a gf to save his life. But he's working on his anger and aggression, and he's trying to stay out of jail.

Not necessarily so here. In domestic cases the police are required by law to make a report and arrest someone if there was any violence. And prosecutors have discretion in what charges to press. At school, of course, the administration decides whether to get the school resource officer involved. That's a city police officer who is permanently assigned to the school.

Once he was involved in an incident on the school bus. He had stolen a can of yellow spray paint from his classroom. During the bus ride he sprayed paint on the back of another kid's head. This kid happens to have been one of my nephew's best friends, so I know a little about him. He was a pudgy, bookish kid that other kids picked on. And he was very proud of his hair which was now full of yellow paint.

At that time, my son used to like to jokingly say things like, "You don't mess a black man's ..." whatever, coat, backpack, whatever happened to be the subject at the moment. So this kid turns on my son and shouts, "You're not a black man. You're a n-----r!" My son saw red and whaled on other boy, punching him in the head several times with a closed fist.

Well, of course, this gets back to the school, and they call in the school resource officer the next day to take police reports all round - my son for battery, the other boy for disturbing the peace. As he's taking the report, the cop realizes that the incident happened after the bus had left the city limits, so the cop didn't have jurisdiction. And they didn't follow up by calling the sheriff to report a crime in the county. So apparently it's the easy access to a police officer on the school grounds that spurs them to make police reports.

@Costello

If you dont mind me asking, what ethnicity is your son/are you?

I dont mean any offense/harm. You dont have to tell me, as well.

No problem. I'm white - Irish, German, possibly Welsh - and maybe others. My father was adopted, so I don't know as much about his birth family; his adoptive family was Scottish. My mom is all Irish on her dad's side and half Irish, half German on her mom's. My dad's biological dad was a Courtney, and his biological mom was a Wynn. For some reason I have it in my head that his dad was Irish and his mom Welsh, but I could be wrong about that.

I know I look very Irish, because I've been told so many times. My godparents took a trip to Ireland once and came back and told me everyone there looked like me.

My sons are both mixed race, white and black.

My biological son - who is the one dx'd psychosis - has me for a mom, of course, and his dad is Nigerian (the Ibibio ethnic group, specifically).

My adopted son's bio mom is white. Surname Miller. His bio dad is African American.

ETA: My dad and I reading when I was about 8 years old: http://forums.psychcentral.com/pictu...ictureid=21349

@Costello

I was just wondering, as I saw what you said the kid said to your son two posts above or so.

I am biracial, myself. Mixed african-american and mexican-american. Of course I have strong caucasian and native-american in me, but i do not say that upfront, as its not in my immediate parents strong enough. Just my grandparents and further backwards.

My older son definitely has issues around race. His dad went back home when my son was 18 months old and has had no contact with us at all. So he was raised only by the white side of his family. It contributed to his feeling that he's different somehow. More than once people (usually black women) approached him with he was small and asked if he was lost - when we were standing right there next to him.

His first psychotic episode featured race in a huge way. He was convinced that people hated him and wanted to kill him because he was black. He kept saying he was the only black living in our city - which isn't true.

And of course he had to endure the pain of living in a racist society - without having family members who are suffering in a similar way.

My younger son was also raised in an all white family. His mom and dad broke up while she was pregnant with him, and she started dating a white man. His two older full siblings ended up living with their dad's side of the family, but he stayed with his mom who then had two more children - both white. They all stayed together for about 8 years, until the kids came into care, living in small towns with few other people of color. My son was placed in a number of different foster homes before he came to me - all of them white until the last one which had a black dad. Nevertheless my younger son doesn't seem to have the same powerful issues around race as my older one does.

Wow, i saw the pictures.

This is all so interesting.

I admit I have issues with my race.

I have a half sister who is caucasian/mexican. I didn't necessarily grow up around a lot of white kids because the side of town i lived on was a mix.

The few friends I did have growing up were all white. In fact, its funny. Black kids did not like me, i never truly knew why. They were not nice to me. I think back now, and i think maybe because I hung out with white kids, but just because i had more in common with those kids and they happen to not be black. in high school, stereotypes run rampant and people voluntarily fall into them, for various reasons. then there were the exception here and there, i was one of them. i didnt like rap/hip-hop music. i was into punk music and donned a spiked vest and a mohawk. it was very confusing to me, because any other ethnicity of kids treated me at least somewhat nice. black kids did not. any ounce of socialization i could try to muster up was accepted by white kids, i noticed.

basically. i hate my ethnicity(s). i could see the hate through other black kids actions/words towards ME. i think they hated themselves too, many of them.

now, that doesnt mean that i didnt get hate for my ethnicity, i did, quite a few "n" words and people talking about black people being monkeys. anyway...i still see it all the time in my region of my state.

i wish i was caucasian. just....yea

My son's friends were mostly white in high school - or mixed. He told me once that they were a bunch of middle-class liberal whites who seemed to expect him to "act more black." But he didn't really know how.

We haven't talked much about race. I do know that when he was in high school, he didn't want to be seen with me. He finally told me he didn't want people so know his mother was white.

When he was very small, he made a point of saying that he was "brown" not "black." When he was about 4 he asked me if it was true that some people might not ask you to their b-day party if you were brown. Finally he told me that a girl at day care told him he wasn't invited to her party because of his race. I went and asked the lead teacher in the classroom about it. It turns out that by the time my son mentioned this to me the girl had been gone from the center for a month. So I don't know how long he stewed over it before he asked me.

I just know it's an issue for him, and one that he doesn't talk to me much about.

Thats him now?

It's hard to talk about. I actually fear going certain places in town because of my ethnicity. At least alone. It seems logical, but i dont know...so..idk? :/

It probably is hard to talk about. I do think it has implications for mental health, though.

Wow, Costello... in that picture you look so like my Mum when she was a girl, we could be related! Only I'm now tall, and overweight, and have curly brown/auburn hair. But I see what people mean when they say you look Irish... you have the map of Ireland on your face, as they say. If someone lined a bunch of people up and asked who was the Irish one they'd probably pick you first time out.

I know my maternal great-grandparents were from County Cork. They arrived separately and married here, so I don't know if they met here or there. He was Jeremiah Dwyer, and she was Mary Brickley. Here's my great-grandfather's obit: http://joco-ks.genweb.us/obits/edger...IAH-DWYER.html.

I'm not sure what tall is to you. I'm 5'6" which I always consider to be average height but I guess is actually a few inches above the average American woman's height. And I'm overweight too. And half that dark hair is now gray.

I spent the summer in northern Nigeria in 1993. I was taken out to a remote village and introduced to the chief. He turned me over to the care of one of his wives. The first thing she said when we were alone was, "You're from Ireland, aren't you?" I was really amazed. Turned out that, even though she'd never been out of that remote area, she was familiar with Irish faces because her husband so admired the Irish!

When I was in South Africa a few years ago I met a Nigerian who prayed in Gaelic. He actually proposed to me, but I wasn't very well at the time, mentally, and ended up torn between wanting a new and exciting life and understanding that I needed time to get better. I still feel a little guilty about dumping him the way I did... however, I had told him three times that I didn't want to marry him, and he kept asking anyway. I'd been widowed six months at the time, and was really very confused. So when I got back to England I just stopped talking to him, though I was very fond of him indeed. I still think I did the right thing, the last thing my son needed was for me to marry someone else and move to the other side of the world.

He'd been taught by nuns, which might explain the Gaelic. It was a truly bizarre experience to hear this very Nigerian man praying in Gaelic. I wonder if that's where the chief got his admiration of Irish women from? There are an awful lot of us out there as missionaries or nurses of some sort or other... at least according to my Nigerian suitor.

Come to think of it I did have a conversation with a Catholic nun in the airport in Lagos. I think she said she was from the UK. We talked about the antimalarial drug I had to take while I was there. She'd lived there 20 years, and I asked if she wasn't afraid she'd destroy her liver taking that poison for so long. Apparently she'd stopped taking it shortly after she arrived, and she'd never had malaria.

The part of Nigeria I was in is heavily Muslim. I'm not sure how many Christian schools and other institutions are in that area. My son's dad is from the south part of the country, and he did attend a Catholic boarding school.