[quote=Hellis]The whole "we should'nt work against verbal bullying" theory is incredibly ignorant when put in perspective. Ignoring a bully is all fine nad well, i agree that you should try and make sure it doesn't get to you. But bullies rarely work alone, many of them are good at making the bullied a outcast from his or her peers. The incredibly cynicism in the statement of "we are coddling" our kids and that it's leading everyone to being "entitled little shits" is bullshit. You want to know who generally feel entitled in that regard, the ones that get away with being a bully, the people more fortunate. As someone who suffered some severe cases of bulliying, It triggered me into a case of severe depression. Severe depressive state at the age of 13, could you fine cynical gentlemen explain to me how that have helped me as a person? It hasn't, the scars many kids have to bear from bullying commonly lead to trends of resentment and alienation.

However, as stated. Bullies are generally people who are in a emotional slump, and they force it onto other. By finding these causes, you can work against bullying. By teaching things such as solidarity and working with kids in regards to make them more empathetic we can limit bullying. Society doesn't need bullying, it should be minimized, if we can save a single more child from living in fear of his peers it should be worth the effort. I feel that arguing against that is morally repugnant and detestable.[/quote]

I'm getting the impression that this was largely directed at me, given that most of those things in quotation marks seem to have come from my post. My point was not that we should just ignore things and let them sort themselves out, but rather that fighting against children being assholes to other children is a futile battle. That is why I said the course of action should be to teach kids how to deal with such bullying themselves, rather than trying to place them in a protective bubble and trying to make children stop being mean to others. Your own experiences are exactly the thing I'm talking about. If you'd had effective anti-bullying skills things very likely wouldn't have gone that far and you would have gained some experience in conflict resolution. If someone had swooped in and tried to drape their protective cloak over you whilst telling the bullies they're hurting your feelings and being awful people and need to stop, well... Did you ever see a teacher try to do that sort of thing? Ends up just giving the bullies more ammunition, doesn't do fuck all to stop them. Bullies go after those they see as weak, and needing adult protection screams weakness to them. Kids need to learn self-defense in this regard, rather than needing protection.

As for trying to find the root causes of bullying and stamping them out, good luck with that, it'll be just as futile as trying to stamp out meanness in children. Hell, it'd probably be more futile since there are so many different things that can cause a kid to think bullying is a cool thing to do, ranging from inherent dickishness to abuse or neglect at home to seeing other bullies do things which they emulate to try to fit in. I wish you well in your crusade, but I don't expect to see anything come of it.

[quote=Hellis]I refuse to sugar coat it. If Jorick can make such a broad statement as calling anti-bullying campaigns bulsshit and say that we coddle our children, then I can state my point of few in equally colorful words. We are arguing on equal grounds here. TO say that bullying is positive, in any sort of way, is ignorant and cynical to such a degree it's insane. Growing a thicker skin from bullying is not worth it when you carry with you childhood trauma from it, when you have your empathetic link to other people irrevocably damaged from fear of being hurt. 

Fun facts: 

-- It is estimated that 160,000 children miss school every day due to fear of attack or intimidation by other students.

-- Suicide rates among 10 to 14-year-olds have grown more than 50 percent over the last three decades.[/quote]

Anti-bullying campaigns are bullshit right now because they're going about it in the most stupid and ineffective ways. You're misunderstanding me if you think I'm saying bullying is an inherently good thing. My point is that futile efforts are futile and should be redirected into effective methods, specifically these campaigns need to switch from trying to end all bullying to giving children the skills and tools necessary to deal with bullying with as little physical and mental damage as possible. Go re-read my first post and pay attention to the second paragraph instead of focusing only on the first. I am against pointless campaigns that preach unrealistic messages, not against doing things to deal with bullying.

Also, as for your so-called facts, that first one is rather shady, a "fact" thrown out there just because a firm number sounds neat. It's actually more than 20 years old and the way they got the number was rather shaky. Here, read [url=http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/160-000-kids-stay-home-from-school-each-day-to-avoid-being-bullied/280201/]the article[/url] I found when trying to find the source of this number. It was from a CDC survey that asked if kids had skipped school in the last month due to feeling unsafe at school or on their way to or from school, many of whom could have responded to with a yes due to living in or near an unsafe neighborhood that they have to walk through to get to or from school. I'd suggest discarding this statistic since it's so old and was never very robust in the first place.

For the suicide thing, I'm curious as to where you got those statistics. I can't find anything for suicide rates by age group in 1984 (closest I could find was a rate for 1980), and the most recent suicide rates I could find were for 2010. [url=http://www.suicide.org/suicide-statistics.html#death-rates]Here[/url] is where I got older numbers, and [url=http://www.afsp.org/understanding-suicide/facts-and-figures]here[/url] (go down to the Suicide Rates by Age section) is where I found yearly rates for 2000-2010. If you want to talk about the last 30 years that we have statistics for, to compare 1980 to 2010, it's only 25% higher, not 50%; in 1980 for this age group there were 0.4 suicides per 100,000, and in 2010 it was 0.5 per 100,000. But that is fairly misleading in and of itself, since the tiny rate (less than 1 per 100,000 per year in all years) of suicide in the 14 and under age group has huge percentage fluctuations from year to year. 2007's rate was 0.3, 2008 and 2009 sat at 0.4, and 2010 was 0.5. A 33% raise and then two years later a 25% raise in the suicide rate among 14 and under children sounds like a crazy pandemic, but it's not, it's a product of the inherently tiny numbers being discussed. Also, if you were to take a 20 year view instead, you could say that the 14 and under suicide rate has dropped ~40 percent because the rate was 0.8 in 1990; cut it down to 15 years and you could say it was almost cut in half, because the rate spiked at 0.9 in 1995. That's the funny thing about statistics: they can be interpreted to mean different things. You, or whoever you got your figure from, used the numbers to try to show a massive problem by being rather selective with year range choices and displaying it as a percentage rather than giving the actual numbers. I already showed how I could be just as misleading by doing the same thing to show how much less suicide there is now.

So I guess the thing to take away from this is to be wary of using statistics to support your claims without actually finding and examining their source, otherwise pricks like me might come along and expose any shenanigans for what they are. :hehe

[quote=Dark Wind]I don't understand this view that some here have stated about "never" being able to solve or get rid of something. It's like saying we can never achieve a said goal, however, history shows us that when there is a claim that such and such a goal can never be accomplished, it ends up getting accomplished.

It's far more realistic to look at something and just say "I don't know."

Can bullying ever be fully eliminated? I don't know. 

However, can it be limited significantly? I believe it can.[/quote]

I can't speak for others, but the reason I say bullying will never be solved or gotten rid of is because of my fairly cynical view of human nature. As I said before, humans are social creatures who form hierarchies; I see cruelty and violence as being just as much a part of human nature as kindness and compassion, and the former is more common than the latter; combine those two, simplify the hell out of it, and you get hierarchies + cruelty = bullying. My point of view on the impossibility of eradicating bullying stems from the exact same school of thought that says that while pure communism is awesome on paper, it'll never work because of the ways people think and act.

I don't know what you mean about limiting it, but I'm of the opinion that the negative effects of bullying can most certainly be significantly mitigated by focusing on equipping kids to deal with these things, rather than trying to eradicate bullying itself. Someone else already used the "teach a man to fish" analogy in this thread I think, but it's apt so I'm going use use it and rephrase it here with another gross simplification. Protect a kid from a bully and he'll be safe and happy for a day, teach a kid to protect himself from bullies and he'll be safe and happy for life.