The Glade 4.0

Were you a victim of bullying and if so, to what degree?

Please consider mainly 6th grade or later; small children generally cannot differentiate simple teasing from bullying

Also, please differentiate being "picked on" (simply made fun of, or being unpopular, minor/very intermittent physical harassment) from bullying (includes being picked on, but also includes regular physical harassment and actual assault)

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Even though I was always the youngest in my class(my birthday was one day past the cut off date to start school, but I was allowed in "early") I was always bigger than the other kids. So I never got picked on ever.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

I had some minor issues to the point where I had to be moved to a different desk in one class at one point in jr high. Not sure if that counts. In high school I had friends in upper classes so I didn't really have any problems. Going to a small school you kind of knew everyone for two grades in either direction.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I was picked on/bullied by one individual until my father told me not to come home until I defended myself. I broke his nose and knocked out his front teeth, and was never picked on or bullied again.

The teachers and administrators involved encouraged kids in that situation to do exactly what I did, and the bullying, for that reason, was rarely an issue where I grew up.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Sadly, this was not the case where I grew up, especially when anyone was getting bullied by more than one person. The administration tended to think "well, that kid is the common element, so they must be the cause", as if one kid would pick a fight with 3 or 4 others, and even when uninvolved kids told them the one was being bullied.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I suspect the teachers were bullies too. I remember how shocked I was when I first realized that parents have the same feelings about kids as other kids. I always thought you grew up and just thought different but when I saw an adult roll their eyes and refer to a kid as a "little dweeb" I started to wonder what adults had thought of me growing up.

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Some of the other kids' parents were like that. With the administration, they just wanted the problem to go away. That sort of thing didn't happen in their school district. Blaming it on one kid was was easier than actually dealing with it.

There was also this belief that kids with good grades or in the higher level classes couldn't be bullies. In point of fact, the worst ones in the years I had trouble (6th and 7th grade; 8th grade and high school were a lot better.) were all kids with good or excellent grades. I didn't like high school, but the problem ceased being bullying before that; it just sucked. I did discover though, that once you were on a school sports team, you no longer got picked on.. even if you weren't liked very much, your team had your back. If they didn't, the coach would have something to say about it even when the rest of the staff didn't give a ****.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'm with DE on this one. At my school bullies tended to run in packs. Against a single bully, at least you had the chance to stand up for yourself, but it was usually a group effort. From the 'classic' scenario where one guy kneels behind your knees unnoticed while his buddy is distracting you and then shoves you so you tumble to the floor (I still think I probably broke my wrist from that at least once, but never got it looked at), to the circle of 8 guys who decided I needed reconstructive surgery on my nose. Standing up to bullies at my school (which I did) resulted in a beat down. The 8 guys incident occurred in response to me actually hitting one of their guys back when he hit me. They followed me home, and beat the crap out of me a block from my house.

I've found that the "school bully" is something of a myth. You generally have a clique that acts as the collective bullies and singles kids out one at a time that they don't like. They use numerical superiority to do two things:

1) Gain a physical advantage in a fight
2) Make it appear that this one kid is the "unpopular" one

In reality there's generally about as many victims as there are bullies but the bullies tend to run in groups where as the victims are almost never an entire clique because even if the bullies still had the physical advantage, that would lose them their political advantage in the eyes of the rest of the students, not to mention certain sorts of adults.

That bulk of the student body is made up of people that aren't precisely bullies or victims either, but they tend to side with the bullies for a number of reasons:
1) They don't want to be the next target
2) Mob mentality
3) even if they aren't inclined to instigate bullying themselves, they'll take the opportunity to feel better than someone else when its presented

Even the kids who are normally victims will tend to side with the bullies when they decide to pick on a different kid, in the hopes that being part of the crowd at that point will put them in that class in the future, or even just to feel like they aren't the victim for once.

TheRiov's example illustrates this. There were 10 or so victims, but they didn't band together to defend each other. Why? They weren't otherwise friends, whereas the primary bullies were almost certainly a clique already. The group that was a problem for me in 6th grade had all played soccer together since like 1st grade.

That was another part of the problem. These guys were quite talented at soccer; they took the PA state championship at least once when I was in high school. Even before that they were good players and no one wanted to believe the soccer stars (part of the thing was that the community loved soccer in the first place because it was more "international") could possibly be anything other than clean-cut soccer stars.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

We had the same sort of cliques, but they tended to dissipate after individual bullies were isolated and beaten horribly. Our teachers did a phenomenal job of facilitating this.

It had to do with the way fights were broken up: if the kid that started the fight was getting the better of it, it was broken up relatively quickly. If the kid who was defending themselves was getting the better of it, the fight was allowed to finish itself. This unspoken rule was doubley true if more than one kid was beating another. (kids were encouraged to come to the aid of a classmate who was being bullied.)

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

We had the clique thing too, but it was made infinitely worse by an incompetent administration's policies. They not only had the zero tolerance thing where both the bully and victim got punished in case of a fight, but this administration did not punish individuals, they used collective punishment for basically all infractions.

Believe it or not, this made defending oneself from bullies even worse than it is under zero tolerance rules. In the event of a fight, the entire class of both the bully and the target would be punished instead of the two people. The problem was the bully's classmates (generally the remedial students) would not care, while the target's classmates would, and would therefore discourage their peers from fighting back.

Wow, that's even more absurd than where I lived. (We had a zero-tolerance policy.)

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It sounds like Rynar went to my elementry/jr high school...

This is amazing to me. I wonder what a society of people taught to collectively defend their morals would be like.

I was both teacher's pet and the weird goth chick in high school.

While there were some verbal taunting, things didn’t need to get physical in school until 9th grade. Mainly due to the fact, pretty, popular girls didn’t want their faces scratched by the pencils I always twirled around my fingers.

One day this kid, who was herself a victim, decided to pick on me. She was never too bright to start with, and I guess wanted to show the other girls she was ‘tough’ to try to get into a clique.

I ignored her until she started yelling abuse about my parents, at which point, I broke her jaw.

I never got teased again, and everyone stayed away from the psycho girl. On the other hand, I kinda felt sorry for the girl who tried to bully me because she never got into the clique, and was bullied her whole time at school as a result.

I always hated bullies. I was picked on some when I was in elementary school but I had friends that would stand up for me. That colored my view going forward and i would always jump in if I saw someone getting picked on or bullied.

I changed schools in 6th grade because we moved. New kid in new school in a city (We had lived in a more rural area before). I got picked on for a while and I stood up to one kid in class one day. Another kid told me to be careful because they would gang up on people in large groups.

One day after school as I was walking home 5 of them came up to me and tried to start pushing me around. I was a hefty kid but I was pretty athletic for my size. They couldn't really push me when I planted my feet and I knew how to use leverage to my advantage. One of them hit me in the head and I just looked at him and smiled and I could see his face drop because he had meant for it to hurt me but it didn't really have an affect. I then went into psycho mode (One of the advantages of having a brother 10 years older than you is learning how to fight at a disadvantage)

I started hitting, kicking, elbowing and head butting anything that was in my line of sight. I got in some good crotch shots and a couple of good head butts to noses. It was almost like a beserker rage, I didn't care what happened to me as long as I hurt them and I was really trying to hurt them. After a few minutes when 3 of them were bleeding they decided to leave me alone.

The next day I called into the principles office I guess someone that lives near the school saw it and reported it. He had all of us in there and he was a dick. I didn't say anything about it and neither did they which pissed him off but there wasn't a whole lot he could do.

The rest of the year I was mostly left alone which was good, i made some friends and went about my own business. After that year we started at our middle high school which was 7th and 8th grade together and brought people from other elementary schools together and me back with some of my old friends. So no issues after that.

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I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and, the blackest eyes... the devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... evil

Never got picked on or bullied by Classmates (older brother and friends were something else), despite being a D&D geek with braces. Not sure if it was because of the school system, or the fact that I was that kid who hit 6ft and 200+lbs by the 7th grade.

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

I only ever remember having issues with one kid in the 8th grade, who for lack of a better term had 2 lackeys. For whatever reason, this kid didn't like me. I had 1 class with him for 1 semester and no interaction with him outside of that class.. never even saw him at school. He himself was not particularly popular outside of his two lackeys and I had a relatively large group of friends.

During the class, the only altercations were some trash talk on his part which was largely ignored by myself and my friends, but one day much later we were both in a study hall and he decided to take it to the next level by attempting to slap me while I was attempting to get some work done. I blocked his first two attempts (I had a brown belt at the time) and the 3rd time I punched him in the mouth, got up while he was crying and went and got the vice principal that was overseeing the class.

My friends collaborated the story of what was happening, so in addition to crying in front of 80+ people, he got escorted out of the room. I honestly don't recall ever seeing him again. I don't know if he left the school, or just started avoiding me.

Other than that, I was never bullied or picked on that I recall. We had assholes like any other population of people, but they were just general assholes. You learned where they hung out at school and just avoid them.

I would be a fool to think there wasn't any bullying at the schools considering the sizes of the campus and classes, but I never saw it directly.

I do know there were some kids that were always at the perimeter and relatively isolated, but even they had small groups of friends, and I never saw anyone go out of their way to bully those kids. It was a live and let live kind of situation from my observation, with a heavy dose of territoriality.