Ask HN: Do you have experience with school bullying?

I had to deal with some alpha-kids at school, but at the time, nobody called that bullying. I also never viewed that as a problem, because I was never heavily beaten and I would also hit back, I hit once a kid so hard that I broke his jaw and nobody ever touched a finger on me and I made very lasting friends after that episode. That made me grow as a person as well, but it wasn't very necessary. I'd rather have not went through this.

Other kids on my class didn't fight back and have been abused, which is quite bad. School has very similar dynamics to prisons and the earlier a kid finds it out(or has parents that explain to them), the better. I also helped a lot of kids that got bullied on school, but there is much more kids willing to bully than kids willing to help. At least that made me also long-lasting friendships.

I think those "bullying" dynamics happen similarly when you become an adult, where police is there to hit minorities and displaced people. Where those alpha-kids with good backgrounds fare very well while bullying employees and doing their own schemes, and when things go south, their banks get bailed out.

Meanwhile you as a working class have to keep pushing forward, accepting to do overtime and so on. Getting bullied forever is something humans just accept as a fate.

Some kids, just as some adults, really fail to fight back and find their own space in that system and end up in a bad position. I'd say that those who failed to fight back at school also end up failing to fight back as adults. At least in the adult world things are a bit more civilised at a times, which gives the impression "that is just life and it's working as expected". But it is still there.

My mother, even though we were very poor, since I was very young, used to tell me how it is important to have an edge/advantage over people and how society is basically made of that. The more I can get away with, the better I'm positioned and that I should pay attention to that and use that to guide me. It took me a while to understand that, but I'm very glad she took the time to teach me that.

Yeah there were a few kids you could always rely on to give you their lunch money

This is something I need to write about, I was born with a cleft-pallet and was heavily ridiculed and bullied throughout my childhood.

This had serious ramifications which prevented me from finishing high school with my class, and I started using drugs and alcohol when I was 14 to cope with the verbal and physical abuse.

This was over 20 years ago though and schools today are much better about addressing these issues - however, I am in a much better position mentally to talk about it now.

What irks me that physical assaults, when done at school, become "bullying".

If something is not OK between adults, it's not OK between children and should be treated accordingly.

I mainly learned about it watching Hollywood movies but didn't think it was real at all until recently. There's no bullying theme where I'm from.

I'm from Algiers, Algeria and I haven't seen bullying. Kids do fight but it's "organized". They give each other a time and a location after school (no need to involve school staff), other kids cheer the fight, make predictions, and ensure it doesn't go too far. Kids get excited by fights, and when it's done, the opponents dust it off. There is also a break-down after the fight by each kid's friends on what they should have done.

However, if the fight is unfair or one of the opponents is too weak for the other, other kids would step up and prevent it from happening. If the stronger kid insists, one or more kids would protect the weaker, and tell the stronger kid to get lost. If not, there's a fight between the stronger kid and the one preventing him from beating the weaker one. There's nothing of the sort of someone repeatedly picking on someone else, humiliating them, taking their food/money, putting them in locker rooms, etc. If a kid did that, they would be beat up usually by some other kid who becomes a sort of body guard. Kids did it for sport but would intervene as soon as something was not "fair" (either one party unwilling to participate or too weak). Even psychological abuse would get stopped by other kids (if a kid mocked another's physique, or economic condition, others would never let it slide and would go to physical violence to correct a perceived tort: like "Call him that one more time and I'll fuck you up" and they did).

That's primary school. Fights become rare in middle school and quasi inexistent by high-school.

Yes,mostly older kids picked on us younger kids on the bus ride home. My school was pretty strict though so someone was suspended for couple of days from school for such activity.

Yes I was bullied (UK, middle class). The teachers were powerless to do anything if they didn't see, and few bullies are stupid enough to assault you when teachers can see.

Nobody ever taught me that I had a right to defend myself. That is what is missing from bullying education. If you have kids, teach them that they have a right to hit back!

This was in primary school. By the time I got to secondary school I had learned to fight back and although some bullies tried to mess with me, ultimately they went looking for softer targets. Sadly I later found out that one of my friends was getting very badly bullied in secondary school - tell your kids to tell a reliable friend if they are getting bullied, I would have been able to help if I had known.

Are you kidding? On paper I should have been a school shooter. I was bullied relentlessly on a near-daily basis by other students and even some teachers. Physically assaulted, verbally harassed, things stolen.. they even loosened the lug nuts on my car. I gave up complaining halfway through ninth grade because the only support I got was “move away from people bothering you” and “tell the teacher”. By telling the teacher I became the annoying problem.

Yes, throughout High School. At that point I had become socially disconnected and didn't have many friends. There were a few people who stood out from the usual put-downs and idiotic comments.

The problem is that even when something physical actually happened, for example, the time when someone sucker punched me in the face at my locker in front of an entire full hallway of students, everyone blamed me because of my size. I'm 6'10" (was probably 6'2" to 6'6" throughout High School) and the school administration always assumed I started it because I was the big and intimidating one.

It was to the point where one time, someone who routinely attacked and insulted me actually punched me right in front of the main office, where there were giant bay windows so the secretaries and administrators could see everything. I barely retaliated by pushing him away and the ROTC teacher broke it up, and because the one who attacked me was in ROTC, I was blamed and suspended.

There was literally never a single time I was attacked like this that the principal didn't assume I was the cause. I'll admit I was a troublemaker and did a lot of stupid shit in High School, but I never initiated any of the fights I got in or the situations I was put in.

The constant put-downs from people and the fact that my home life wasn't much better affected me academically to the point where I stayed back twice and the administration shuffled me off to an alternative school where I didn't actually learn anything of use because they didn't want to deal with me anymore.

I was in High School in the mid-2000s and should have graduated 2007, so it's not like this was in the 80s. The administration was just terrible and didn't care.

But hey, 10+ years later and I have a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and things have gotten a lot better. High School is a temporary, shitty time, and it won't have any bearing on your life afterwards unless you let it.

Got bullied in high school because I was "the slim tall guy" and because my mother was a teacher in middle school of some of these bullies so they thought they could try their revenge on me.

They heavily verbally bullied me but never tried physical contact. Going back I think I would physically react early to stop the abusing because it prolonged for a very long time (3~years, until I was big enough that they probably thought risking my physical reaction would end very very bad for them)

As some other users said: teach your kids they have the right to defend themselves.

I grew up in eastern Europe in the 90s and 00s - the whole conversation about bullying is really foreign to me and it really stands out how common it seems to be in the US and to a lesser extent in the UK.

Coming into year 7 I went to school with a bad atmosphere and some really bad people it. Management also had some idea that they'd break up all the prior groups, so I got placed with only one guy that wasn't really a close friend for classes. For the first year it wasn't very personal. Senior students would loudly mock me, and a lot of non-aggressive pupils, usually for some thing to do with personal style or alleged sexual perversion, in front their peers, sometimes someone would sweep my leg, or break stuff, mostly like expensive mechanical pens or textbooks/notebooks. The younger jackasses in my cohort would do things like light spray deodorant on fire and use it as a flamethrower and sweep laser pointers against peoples eyes (and at the time it was still rumored that can give permanent eye injuries). Year 8 I had dirty pond water thrown at me and a classmate by a group of bullies blocking a path. They scattered and ran when I started towards them, but after that it was personal. I guess rumors travel quickly in those circles and I had about a year and a half of personal hell as they marked me (always in groups, the fucking cowards) in recess and lessons with weak teachers. First followup I got soaked through with water the assailant said she'd taken out of the toilet. Not too long after two guys cornered me with a clear aim at breaking my musical instrument and beating me up. They didn't succeed, I evaded, but the ringleader was known to have beaten a guys face bloody against a brick wall, so the threat wasn't idle. In practice the physical violence was limited to getting pushed roughly into lockers and getting hit i the back of my head once when one of them managed to catch me unaware. They broke my vehicles twice, one of them in a way I'm just lucky didn't kill me in a traffic accident. But the constant threat of much worse violence and their ever-present jeering about my alleged sexual deviances, mocking my dialect, calling me crazy, and so on, that really took its toll. I had days when I couldn't hold any food. I'd just throw up frow the stress. As for the crazy, they were just being assholes then, I was simply a sensitive kid with too much belief in pacifism and going through the system. But that one they kind of managed to make come true. I have struggled for decades now with depressions and a sense of hopelessness. I can't connect with friend groups, I've been in to shitty shape to get a partner and I am fighting the suicide impulses less and less for my sake and more for the effects on my relatives. And I won't say the bullying alone did that, but it was an indispensable beginning for it.

For your statistics, this was Sweden.

Dealt with some bullying, always verbal, mostly in elementary school (I was a weird kid, I suspect from lack of socialization) and in middle school, although at that point I start fighting back and ended up getting in lots of trouble and often finding myself at the other end of bullying.

High school was different. By high school I just wanted to keep my head down and do what I had to graduate. Didn't have a whole lot of friends, but wasn't bullied either. I was mostly amicable with everyone I interacted with.

I've been on both sides of bullying.

In one context (school), I was somewhat of a bully. I was bigger than the rest of my class, and I often attempted to assert my dominance, usually by making jokes at people's expense. In another context (competitive sports outside of school), I was typically the primary outsider who was bullied in just that manner.

I don't know where (or if) to draw a causal line, but I do know that memories of both sides of that equation seem to involve deep-seated insecurities and feelings of inadequacy.

Guy from Germany here. I were with my twin (both guys) in the same class. Im also a Christian who really belives in the Bible (Really rare in my area). In short: I were an outsider (but together with my brother). Nonetheless bullying wasnt really a thing. In the beginning some kids gave it a try, but the achieved nothing. Generally the time was really great, we had a lot of fun. Our class was awesome and stood together. We had the typical Groupes and often little figths, but it never got physical. If a new kid came in class he had some starting problems, but generally new friends were made quickly. Bullying happend, but on a minor scale and never physical, just the stupid stuff kids say if they want to be cool.

I was lucky enough to not suffer much from bullying. I was introverted and nerdy, but I also liked sports and was lucky enough to look athletic enough that people wouldn't start fights with me. I'd get the occasional bit of verbal bullying, but again I've been lucky enough to be able to brush it off and not let it bother me. Sadly, a lot of my friends at the time didn't have the same luck, and I watched a lot of people get picked on for years.

Not standing up for them was one of my biggest regrets as a kid, because I watched it destroy some of them. The common stereotype of nerds growing up to be successful and having character, while the bully rots in some run-down area is far from the truth. It might happen, but I've seen plenty of assholes from my school days have decent lives while old friends from school have gone from zero confidence as a kid to zero confidence as an adult.

It's one thing that I shared with many of these kids. I had very little confidence in myself as a kid, but thankfully I've managed to find some thanks to a mixture of a decent career, keeping fit, and being involved in combat sports. For the past few years I've done BJJ and some MMA, and despite being an adult that hasn't had a "real fight" since I was a kid, the confidence I feel from being able to defend myself enough to run away/escape is life-changing.

It's probably the kind of advice you'd get from a boomer, but I'd recommend enrolling a kid in a combat sport like BJJ or Kickboxing, if not to teach them to fight, then to instil some confidence in their ability to defend themselves from someone attacking them or their friends. Confidence in something/anything is key.

I live in Italy.

Being a giant all my life (190cm now, 188cm age 16), and a taciturn good boy, I was continuously bullied until say 18 years old.

This guy I want to talk about, kept teasing, challenging, bullying me for three years until I just snapped, lost control of my actions, and woke up 10s later holding him by his neck 40cm above the floor against a wall.

We became friends a couple hours later.

USA.

In Kindergarten I punched a kid on the bus for taking “my seat.” I remember being surprised I had done it. I wasn’t thinking about it or intending to do it. The bus driver wrote me up, and I had a talk with the principal the next day. The talk was confusing for me and I was a “good kid” so it was a little traumatic as well. What I took away from it was that it was never okay to hit.

Well, that meant I didn’t hit back, either. I was bullied a little in elementary school after that, always physically; mostly by one guy who was older and bigger by virtue of being held back a year. There was one older girl who tried to verbally bully me when she saw me but I didn’t understand what she was saying so it never really bothered me.

Things were really bad in middle school. My parents divorced, which was devastating to me, and I was in a new school district with all new kids. And I didn’t hit back. I was bullied constantly on the bus by a big kid and his toady. I had a few more bullies at school as well, and when I moved again (same district/school) I had bullies in my neighborhood so I got bullied by some of the same kids even away from school. Everything combined put me in a place where standing up for myself wasn’t possible emotionally, and the few times I tried it made things worse.

There is a lot of truth to “just standing up for yourself” to end bullying, but that just shifts it onto the next victim; and it wasn’t something that could help me at the time.

For no reason I understand, maybe school policy, the bullying stopped being physical in the ninth grade, and for the rest of high school it stopped completely.

PSA: if your kid is being bullied in school, it is totally OK to knock the shit out of the bully exactly once (after gathering sufficient evidence of bullying). It will resolve 99% of your kid's problems.

Yes, in elementary school, relentlessly. Lots of verbal abuse, being excluded but also regular physical abuse. Fist fights were a daily occurrence at my elementary school, often to the point of real injury (i.e. bleeding). Fights didn't just involve bullies and people being bullied either.

All this was in the Netherlands. Past elementary school I haven't seen much bullying. My elementary school was particularly bad but friends who went to different schools also confirm that this kind of thing wasn't unusual.

USA

"Good" Public Elementary School (ages 6-11): Little to no bullying

Small Catholic Middle School (ages 12-14): a decent amount of physical/verbal bullying. I escaped most of it by being a bigger kid. But it definitely seemed like an issue in the Catholic schools in the area (I saw the same pattern at a summer school at another school).

"Progressive" Private high school (ages 15-18): Little to no bullying. But lots of pressure to succeed. We had a pretty bad suicide problem, considering the size of the school.

I am curious if there are people who don't have experience of some sort of school bullying.

I experienced lots of bullying. It messed me up real good emotionally. It also greatly informed my worldview (for better or for worse).

So the details about the bullying:

public north-eastern grade & middle school: physical bullying during school hours (punched, shoved, tripped etc). The occasionally roughing up outside (never anything truly violent, just some bruises and black eyes). Teachers always took the "punish both sides". Later on I was lucky to both join a group and endear myself to one of the scariest kids around. This protected me from 80% of instances and things got much better.

private all-boys school: more emotional, getting called lots of names, people ignoring you, calling you weird, laughing at you, etc. It made it very tough to be confident and as a result, I spent the first 2 years by myself.

What can be learned from these experiences? Confidence and patience are necessary in developing and managing relationships. I heavily discount the ideology of truly being an "individual" when it comes to the perception of your peers. I'd rather have them think of me as your average nice person, and then we can build our relationship past that if the opportunities arise. The current kids have it rough with Social Media, and I would imagine it adds complexity making it more difficult. You are effectively making a bet with your public-facing persona, and some of us bite off more than we can chew.