I’m in Missouri right now and last night I saw a newscast on a local channel about the growing number of bullying incidents. A State Representative was saying that schools as well as local and state governments had to be held responsible for not managing to stop the bullies from terrorizing their victims.
As usual, everybody was held responsible for the behavior of bullies except the people who had the greatest influence on their upbringing, the parents. Parents in this country traditionally enjoy every right to do whatever they want with their children but are never held to any responsibility whatsoever for the results of their parenting. All these conversations about how schools and governments can stop bullying are completely useless because they expect the educators and the authorities to correct somebody else’s screw-ups without going to the source of the problem.
Bullying could be addressed very easily and very effectively by fining the parents of bullies for every instance of bullying. They are the ones who inflicted these little treasures onto the rest of society, so it stands to reason that they should pay. If a child breaks a window or vandalizes a car, the parents get to compensate the damages. So why aren’t we requiring that the damage bullies do to other human beings is being compensated monetarily?
The fines for bullying should be heavy and grow exponentially with every fresh instance of bullying. Maybe when the irresponsible parents are finally forced to sell their plasma screen TV to pay the fine, they will find time to start spending time with their children and doing something to turn them from little animals into normal, healthy members of society.
Clarissa's Blog 
Unfortunately, I see it as more like that if such a system were to be implemented, the parents would respond by beating their errant children, thus causing them to become desultory assholes to an even greater extent.
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That’s what I thought too. It’d be great if it were this simple, and I don’t doubt plenty of bullies *are* enabled by “my-child-can-do-no-wrong” parents, but probably just as many, if not more, use violence because their parents use violence on them.
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In Canada, there are efforts to introduce laws that will criminalize the beating of children. Huge numbers of people are in an uproar against it. So you are right, many people are completely barbaric and stupid. But I find that a threat of losing money often has a very enlightening effect.
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“little animals into normal, healthy members of society.”
You’re rather assuming that the parents are sufficiently normal and healthy members of society to be able to teach their children how to be the same. If this were the case, the kids would probably not be bullies.
Parents are often in denial about their kids, and a slur on their kid’s reputation is also a personal insult on them. It’s almost impossible to tell these parents they are doing a crap job. Fining them would probably have little effect except to exacerbate the situation.
There is no easy solution, but it is important to stop the bullies not only for their current victims but also because kid bullies can become adult bullies at work/home and continue the misery.
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It might stop poor kids from bullying, but it would not have stopped Mitt Romney from bullying others as a child. His father would have been unaffected by a $10,000 fine.
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Rich people often tend to be quite stingy.
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Can we kill dead the ridiculous idea that kids bully because they have low self-esteem? If anything, pumping self-esteem up to unreasonable levels, followed by reality deflating it, is more likely to cause bullying.
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I think bullying is permitted to a society that wants to give free rein to “human nature”, without caring what that turns out to be or knowing what it is in the first place. I’ve had patriarchs say, “You’ve got to let anyone freely express themselves in a misogynist way, because that is human nature!” but then it turns out that human nature comes hunting for them, too. When that happens, I say, “Well what could anyone do? It was bound to happen — because there you have it, human nature!”
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You are absolutely right. Whenever parents are told that their kids have been bullying others, they immediately come up with “Kids will be kids, so what can you do?” Of course, when these same parents discover what it feels like to reap the fruits of their own upbringing, they don’t want to hear that kids will be kids any more.
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I hope that Western society can move through the current obsession it has with “natural is good”, without even having the faintest idea of what natural is or why it is necessarily good. For instance, Americans and their child rearing methods are so far removed from natural that they will never be able to approach it from any direction. If you want to see something close to normative, organic human behavior, go to Africa and see how the children behave there. They are rarely, if ever, mean-spirited and competitive. They share and laugh all the time.
America has taken human experience in the opposite direction. It can’t then invoke human nature by remarking that kids will be kids or boys will be boys when it has no idea of what these might otherwise be, apart from American society.
It would be logical to impose some restrictions on self-indulgent excesses, but there is no philosophical framework in place to do so.
In Africa, there is Ubuntu, and I can say my childhood was colored by this as I was growing up.
http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/blog-post.html
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Bullies would thrive on this. You can’t stop bullying because bullies are smart.
It would not be difficult to have a group of bullies to get this fine on a child they wish to bully. The punishment would go up steeply as the money would go up.
Parent’s are weird they seem to want teacher’s to raise their kids but then give them very little tools to do so. Not to mention little respect for the hard work they do.
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I can’t imagine how that would happen when every teacher knows exactly who the bullies are. The only problem with punishing them is irresponsible parents who refuse to do anything about their stupid brats.
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Clarissa, there is a very pervasive myth that bullies are the opposite of empaths. Bullies are “sociopathic”, which is considered a good thing by many wanna-bes, because they are seen not to have the disadvantage of emotion to hold them back. This enables them to be CEOs, whereas empaths only end up losing out on the evolutionary race by becoming school teachers.
If you visit many sites describing sociopathy, you will find many a young troll proclaiming that almost certainly he is a sociopath, because he is more intelligent than others and doesn’t respond to emotional appeals.
The idea that there are two opposite types in the world is based strongly on mythical thinking, which does not take into account a great deal of the complexity of normal, everyday reality.
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All I’m suggesting is that, regardless of why bullies are who they are, the burden of dealing with them is placed on the shoulders of those who produce them, that’s all. People nowadays conduct all kinds of weird experiments onm their children and then throw tantrums and accuse schools for not correcting the damage they inflict on their kids.
When two teenagers gunned down a crowd of their classmates at Columbine high school in Colorado, people actually PITIED their parents. They pitied vile freaks who produced these little monsters and inflicted them on the world! This is ridiculous.
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Sure. What I’m saying is there is inherent ideological sympathy for bullies. Definitely, though, we should ignore the ideological baggage and treat the situation without concern for the feelings of those who do not step in to stop the bullying when they have enough power to do so.
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I’ve lived through it where the teacher didn’t know who the bully was. Bullies are not always a big brute pushing kids around stealing their lunch money. It can be more subtle and they can be convincing liars. Furthermore teacher’s are not omniscient nor infallible. They can make an error of judgement or a string of error’s like anybody else.
Also with cyber bullying it would be very difficult to tell if little Jimmy’s hurtful post was done by little Jimmy, or Billy who managed to make it look quite convincingly like Jimmy.
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I identified my cyber-bullies and had their names and home addresses within 2 hours. I don’t believe that kids all that more technologically sophisticated. My college students have to be taught how to open an email attachment.
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There was a situation recently in Japan, where a middle school kid was bullied and the teachers downplayed it because they didn’t want to lose status and funding. He jumped from the roof of a building and then there were heavy repercussions, with the police, parent organisations and vigilantes getting involved. The parents of the bullies were misidentified and received harassing phone calls at work.
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I mean, people with similar names received the harassing calls.
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“There was a situation recently in Japan, where a middle school kid was bullied and the teachers downplayed it because they didn’t want to lose status and funding.”
– I always wonder, where are the parents in this situation? Such stories are always reported as if the kids were orphans.
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The parents moved their kids to another school to escape the publicity, so they seem to have been complicit in protecting their children from facing the consequences of their actions.
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I rest my case.
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//It would not be difficult to have a group of bullies to get this fine on a child they wish to bully.
Agreed.
//I can’t imagine how that would happen when every teacher knows exactly who the bullies are.
You’re very naive here. In tales of bullying I read of on various (feminist & not) blogs a common thread is teachers ignoring the situation (& sometimes even liking the popular bullies more than cowered victims).
In many US schools parents / teachers / community are against teaching anti-bullying messages out of fear it would “normalize” gay people / relationships. Why do you think they will protect a (suspected to be) gay kid, like a “sissy” boy, or not “modest” girl student?
When situation is not ignored, school tries to protect first itself by expelling BOTH parties or only a victim.
Quite a lot stories described bullies bullying in peace, but the moment a bullied child tried to give back, s\he was reprimanded by teachers.
In general, bullying is treated somewhat like sexual violence in that that blame is shifted unto victims, who’re often seen as the source of the problem.
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You know that I don’t subscribe to teacher-bashing narratives. The only reason why teachers don’t do anything about the bullies is sheer impotence. Teachers are terrified of saying or doing anything that will upset parents, that’s all.
Instead of promoting this baseless belief in the evil nature of teachers, we should stop and consider what purposes it serves.
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I googled and found this article about protecting your child in case of bullying against both the bully and the school. Since it’s a professional website, hopefully, the information is correct:
http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/zerotolerance.htm
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Ah, more teacher-bashing that gives parents even more opportunities to shift the blame off themselves onto teachers. What a convenient position.
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He is talking about parents of bullied kids. Even if that their child is bullied is 100% parents’ fault (I don’t think it’s 100%, but let’s go with it), bullied kids have been expelled. Do you really think he and many former bullied kids (now adults) are all lying about being punished by the school after being bullied?
I don’t believe in any evil nature of teachers. Most my relatives have been teachers too. I do think that there’re different teachers, as there’re different people. Some of them like bullies, others can’t stop them because of lacking power, third are indifferent, forth …
You write a lot about administrators at your university. Usually bad things. School administrators and management try to protect the institution from suits by various means, which the man from the quoted site described. Why is it so hard to believe in? I suppose (wrongly?) you had “evil teachers” lamp switch on in your head & reacted thus, while that man and I (as I understood him) meant “institutions protect themselves by any means necessary” (as administrators at your university).
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If we could all achieve a consensus that parents are responsible for the results of their parenting, institutions would have nothing to protect themselves from. But even here, at a blog where we have very intelligent readers, the resistance to this simple idea is too high.
“Do you really think he and many former bullied kids (now adults) are all lying about being punished by the school after being bullied?”
– The anxiety attendant on introducing one’s parents into the zone of criticism is too overwhelming.
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All I’m suggesting is that, regardless of why bullies are who they are, the burden of dealing with them is placed on the shoulders of those who produce them, that’s all(Clarissa)
Im not so sure you fully get the dynamic for some bullies. Many times its the surrounding culture that “produces” them. To lay all of that on parents or a parent is ludicrous.
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I want a serious conversation here, not childish discussions of “surrounding cultures.”
The resistance to making parents responsible for results of their parenting is very high even in this thread. And the excuses get thinner and thinner. What’s missing is to see somebody argue that parents of bullies are victims here.
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Umm, be nice. I am being serious as in I have been on both sides of what you are talking about. I can tell you emphatically my mother had nothing at all to do with it. Peers and others have a much greater influence.
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Roles are created and assigned at home and only at home. Of course, getting rid of the idea of parental infallibility involves very serious personal growth of which many people are simply incapable.
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Maybe, but not all those roles are solely created and assigned by your parents. In fact, if I remember correctly, you helped raise your sister, right?
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I can only repeat that all roles are created and assigned at home. My role as a sister-raising figure was also assigned to me at home.
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Homes dont always have parents.
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Of course, if parents are dead or incarcerated, the fine falls on legal guardians.
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What about the homes where there are neither and there are plenty of those in the real world too? Should the fine then be applied to teachers? Bullies are made from a combination of factors. Your factors are just a tad shortsighted.
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There are children who live alone with no legal guardian? Where exactly in North America does this happen?
And no, bullies are not created by teachers. They are created at home. I think it would be helpful to you to analyze why this idea is so traumatic to you.
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Oh I dont doubt it could be at home. I just dont agree with you that its all on the parents or parent. I think that is incredibly simplistic. You are entitled to that viewpoint though. 😉
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Im curious though, do you think some bullies become bullies after they leave home?
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Only as a result of what was done to them at home.
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So, let me get this straight. I can only be a nice person in life if that was a result of my upbringing. I cant learn that behaviour if my upbringing was shitty and nasty, right?
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After people come of age, they have the legal agency and the resources to solve their issues and undo the damage done to them in childhood. After 18, everybody is legally and financially responsible for their own actions. I’m sure you knew all this already.
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Exactly, Agency. Cant blame it on the parents after 18 or so. If you become a bully later in life its because you are a shithead, not because of something that happened to you when you were a kid. You know that though, youre just too stubborn sometimes to admit things, lol. 🙂
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But without addressing the trauma inflicted by the parents the issue will not be solved.
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@Clarissa
You might find this interesting. Heck you may even see some of yourself in it. I saw some of me. 😦
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJChiZMYh1k&feature=related
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@musteryou: Sociopaths become CEOs and empaths become teachers? You are either being sarcastic and I’m missing your point, or this is the most ridiculous generalization I have heard in a very long time.
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As I read her comment, she is describing a pervasive cultural myth about sociopathy, not what she herself believes is true.
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Yes, I’m sure I used the word, “myth”, in my comment. Did it disappear after I wrote it? That is so weird. I apologize for its non-presence.
By the way, I think Clarissa’s idea about solving the bullying problem is worth trying. After all, many other ideas have been tried, some absurd to the extreme — like blaming teachers and getting the bully and bullied to talk it out.
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When I was in high school, I (along with a couple of other students) was accused of bullying a new girl in our class. Her mother came to school and convinced all the teachers that I was a bully. It was brought to my parents’ attention and a scene after a scene ensued. The next few months were horrific for me – my teachers would lower my grades and pick on me relentlessly, my parents would lecture me constantly. Not only did I never bully anyone in my whole life, I had never even spoken to this girl or about her a single time. Thankfully, it became clear over time that her mother had some deep issues and was manipulating her daughter to believe that the whole world was against the two of them. However, if fines were indeed present for bullying, our parents would have gone bankrupt for the amount of time this lasted. It is a complex issue and I most definitely agree that parents are to blame for these situations, but what if it is the parent on the other side of the conflict? Who would be tasked with analyzing each situation and making sure a fair decision is made?
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