People will truly go to any lengths to avoid placing their parents under critical scrutiny. Forty years is small potatoes. There are those who throw their entire lives away to avoid putting in words the intolerable truth.
Looking for a Bully
Opinions, art, debate
Clarissa's Blog 
Most likely his bully was also abused by his own parents, just like the author himself. Only their response was different. It’s incredible he still doesn’t understand it.
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Say what? School-age children do bully other children, and one can’t automatically blame the bullied child’s parents for the actions of the other child. Kids don’t necessarily want their parents to fight their battles for them.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. They ship him off to a boarding school, create the kind of a beautiful relationship where he is traumatized for life by a bully but can’t even share it with his own parents, but they are not in the least to blame. God forbid we should hold adults accountable for the children in their care. That would be such a heavy burden for the poor darlings.
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Nobody blames the parents for the actions of the other child. Nobody wants them to fight the battles for their kid. The problem is that usually those kids will be the victim of bullying in school, who were firstly bullied at home by their own parents. The poor kid just acts the same role at the school that he learned at home, and has no idea how to protect himself, because being a victim is the only role he has encountered during his short life. Every living creature has a natural, instinctive self-defence mechanism which is intended as a protection against attacks (e.g. bullies). When a kid is constantly bullied at home in his formative years, his natural self-defence mechanism will be sooner or later dissolved. Parents are the biggest bullies on the Earth. Kids only mimic the behaviour they learned at home (both the bully and the victim). That has been true for every single bullied child I’ve ever known.
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http://www.lulu.com/shop/jennifer-armstrong/the-father-daughter-war/hardcover/product-21894271.html
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Perhaps it is a form of bullying for parents to teach their children not to hit other children, to try to resolve things with words, to try to ignore bullies because the bullies are wrong, in other words, to teach their children to act in a civilized manner with some self-restraint. There’s also the whole gender performance issue, where boys are given official latitude to torment and beat up others because “boys will be boys”, but girls are punished by the school if they punch their tormenter.
In general, forty or fifty years ago, boarding schools were seen as “character building” and good for children, and are no longer accepted as uncritically today.
Maybe you don’t understand WHY some children are seen as natural victims. Any child who is different is a potential victim. I was younger and smarter than my classmates (skipped grades), had unusual interests, and was not motivated or socially savvy enough to try to be in the “in” crowd and retaliate socially against the bullies. Thankfully my parents supported my differences rather than blaming me for not fitting in.
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That description fits me to a T. I never got bullied in school though, and not because there weren’t any bullies in my class, so that can’t be why some kids are seen as natural victims. It’s not that the bullies had better victims than me so they spared me, either – there was no bullying in my class, even though there were kids who were utterly despised by ~75% of the class, for 2 years, until a kid who did fit the “natural victim” profile joined the class. He wasn’t any younger than the bullies, he was of average smartness for that class and had no unusual interests, and when it came to social skills (or wealth of his family, which is another thing I’ve seen mentioned in bullying cases) he was no worse than me or others who the class had pegged as weird but not to be messed with, but he had a hell of a time for two years.
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Children who get assigned a role of a victim at home take this role with them everywhere they go.
Children who are not victimized at home can be as different as they like and everybody will adore them. I had this kid in my grade who – as I now realize – was seriously autistic. He had very poor motor skills, would go through non verbal stages, would climb under a desk in class and sit there for hours. And he did that straight until graduation. He was absolutely brilliant and had a collection of the most bizarre hobbies. He’d freak out if anybody accidentally touched his stuff. And in Physical Education he was even worse than me, which is hard to imagine.
And with all of these quirks, the big athletic guys in the class respected, protected and trailed after him which I am not sure he even noticed. This kid was never bullied or anything of the kind. And others, who were a lot less weird, were.
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You know, I was victimized quite a bit as a kid, but there was always the expectation in my family that *only* family get to treat each other like utter crap, so by the time I was 8 the difference between outside roles and inside roles was firmly fixed in my personality and I had absolutely no problems with bullying.
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“You know, I was victimized quite a bit as a kid, but there was always the expectation in my family that *only* family get to treat each other like utter crap, so by the time I was 8 the difference between outside roles and inside roles was firmly fixed in my personality and I had absolutely no problems with bullying.”
– Yes, that’s also a very common scenario. It’s my own scenario, as well, so I know what you mean.
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