h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This is excellent. I wish I could have read it when I was a kid.

The Role of 'Authority Figures'
Bullying is often described as an interaction between one bully and one victim. I don't think this happens that much. At the very least, there is an audience which plays a vital role in egging on the bully and in compounding the humiliation of the victim. Often a group gangs up on an outsider. In truth, the gang is not all that interested in the victim. They are interested in defining who is in and who is out, initiating new members or establishing a pecking order based on who is the most extreme in tormenting a victim. An important thing to realise about this is that the 'gang' sometimes includes the teacher. A weak teacher can establish the co-operation of the majority of his/her pupils by organising them ( subtly, almost imperceptible ) into a gang by identifying a victim and giving a kind or permission for the tormenting. The only solution to this, but a completely effective one, is to change teachers.

ahh - good point. I've seen this happen, but never really understood what was going on till you put it so clearly... thanks!

I notice on the h2g2 homepage they are calling for articles/submissions on bullying.

Agreed. The whole point in Bullying isn't the one big bully versus everyone account we see in films/books/cartoons etc. It's usually everyone versus the class "geek"

PS: Submit this article!

My own response with bullying wasn't physical or even verbal for the most part, but psychological. That may sound strange, particularly as I was in the sixth grade (for those of you outside the US, I was 10, and the others in the class were one to two years older than me because I had just skipped fifth grade), but it is true. There was no physical abuse at all - this was a nice private school and such things were Simply Not Done; if it had ever occured tp the girls, though, I'm sure they would have done that too. There was really only one girl who hated me, but because of her manipulative power she got all the rest of the class to follow her lead, and the most the teacher ever said to stop the bullying was "Come on now, people. Don't be mean. Warm fuzzies, everyone, warm fuzzies," which, as you might imagine, was *really* effective. So in my case the theory of amny picking on one and the useless teacher is correct. However, by the end, it had given me a great sense of self nad the ability to truly not care about idiots like that. Long post with details can follow if anyone wants it.

I would submit it - but it's a long way from being finished...

Life is a work in progress.

I understand you can continue to add to an article, once submitted and even accepted. This article, although unfinished, is excellent. It would be good to have this, rather than some flippant fluff which is likely to be submitted in response to the call.

SilverSolstice, although you have intrigued me with your account of purely psychological bullying - I am only familiar with grossly physical bullying - I guess posting details on the internet might be an iffy proposition.

What could be really helpful is a description of how you transformed the experience into 'a great sense of self'', which might help others to do the same.

For myself, I learned 'to truly not care about idiots' - and then years later had to unlearn it since it was giving rise to insenstivity and arrogance.

ditto here Raven - I'm the most insensitive git I know, and alternately over-arrogant or insecure - to the extent thhat I foget whether the arrogance or the insecurity is the facade... The bonuses I've got are that nothing (literally) bugs me, and I can make myself instantly happy on a whim.

That said, I'm not unlearning it - there are times when the negative traits are highly useful, and I'd rather have them and control them, than not have them at all.

Martin - realises that if he wasn't arrogant he'd have said "probably the most"

I don't mind posting it - I figure that as long as no names are mentioned, it sould be all right. Warning, though: it's long. Here we go!

Well, this was my first experience with hatred, and I had no idea how to deal with it. The class I had come from was sbout 14 people (I said it was a small school) who had for the most part been in the same class since first or second grade (six and seven years old, roughly.) We all knew each other's strengths and weaknesses, and we drew attention to the strengths and didn't mention the weaknesses. For instance, we always talked about how one boy was the fastest runner in the school and how he could draw well, never that in third grade he had only memorized the times tables up to the threes. I won't go so far as to say we were all friends - there was the typical rivalry between girls and boys that age - but we had a peaceful, cooperative accord between us.

Then I skipped fifth grade (being such a small school, there was no program for talented students, so their solution was to skip me), and this girl, we'll call her Amy, hated me. The reason for this is that previously, she had been the only one in the school to skip a grade (she didn't go to kindergarten - big deal, neither did I, but that's incidental), and she constantly called attention to that fact. Then I came along, ten months younger than her and having skipped a grade mor recently, and I did better than her. The reason for _this_ was that instead of paying any marginal attention in class, she was always talking with her symbiote, we'll call her Carrie. The two did everything together and were the most poweful force in the class, so once Amy decided she hated me, Carrie hated me too, and manipulated the class so that they were all more or less against me.

I was totally unaware of this. I thought everything was still the same as my old class, so I kept trying to make friends with the people.

The girls mainly made me do stuff I didn't like - not so much made me, but I thought I had to, to try to make friends with them - and made me feel ashamed to do the things I liked to do, like reading and singing in the school choir. In particular I remember one instance. Over a period of about a week, I had been reading several different books: one was about a girl who went insane (Lisa Bright and Dark, in case you're interested, it's good), another was about a girl who got AIDS (It Happened to Nancy), another was about a girl who used drugs (Go Ask Alice), and so on. After I told her about the third one, Amy looked at me funny and said, "You like books about people with _problems_, don't you?" The boys aminly harrassed me as I played games on the computer (generally taking the form of surrounding me and chanting loudly, "You're gonna die!" Once I got so mad I picked up a chair and started swinging it at them. Didn't hit any, though. ).

How the epiphany came about: Amy and Carrie liked to act like they were little kids or babies, so they often devised stupid games to help them dot his. We were palying one of these games on the playground one day, and I announced, "I'm next." Amy retorted, "No, I'M next." I said, "But...I called it first." And she said, "I AM NEXT." And all of a sudden, it occurred to me, I'm playing a game I think is stupid, with people I don't like and who don't like me. WHY????? They've been making me unhappy all schoolyear, and I've been making myself unhappy; they're obviously not going to stop making me unhappy, but I can at least make myself happy and be happy on one count. So the remainder of the year was fairly pleasant.

A final note: later in the year (I think the epiphany occurred in February, so this is still winter) we were all out on the playground, and Amy and Carrie had taken everyone else's wonter jackets to help build themselves a fort inside one of the huge tires we had lying horizontally on the ground (she didn't take mine, though!) And one of then other girls said, "I wish I had my jacket back. I'm cold." "So go and take it," I said. "They don't have more right to it than you. It's meant to keep you warm, not to build them forts with. Go and take it back, say, 'I need it more than you do.'" And she just looked at me as though the thought had never occurred to her, and as though she'd never consider doing it even now after I had pointed it out to her. I may have been the most obvious victim, but those two manipulated everybody, and I don't think anyone much was happy except the two, and possibly not even them.

SilverSolstice, thanks for letting us read this.

It seems to me that you dealt with the problem by ignoring the bullies. Does this seem correct? As the article mentions, this strategy often does not work at all well, so I wonder if you did not do somethng in addition.

Ignoring the bullies will often infuriate them, and cause them to go to greater extremes in an attempt to provoke a response. The other snag with this strategy is that it can leave the victim very isolated. I would guess, from my brief impression of you, that this would be a big problem for you - you seem like you were accustomed to a great deal of social interaction.

Your account does not suggest that you felt particularly isolated afterwards - perhaps the bullies did not have the entire class in the palm of their hand and you were able to recruit some members to your 'side'? It would be neat to know how you went about doing that.

Actually, I have always been something of a loner, so isolation didn't bother me much. Social interaction is all very nice, but I'm perfectly capable of living without it for a while. Also, my old class had about 15 minutes of overlap time with the recess of my new class, so I could go talk with them for a while, too. Sadly, I did not "recruit" any more members to my side.

Also, I think "ignoring" would be more of a problem if the bullying were physical - as per the blocking the door example in the entry - or even verbal. With psychological bullying, once you no longer care what the bully thinks of you or says to or about you, the bullying is over, no matter what the former bully may do. It's unique in that way because the amount of suffering is determined entirely by the bullied. I'm just glad I realized that then, without having to suffer through years of misery.

Well, that will teach me to make a sweeping judgement on someone based on a couple of ( longish ) internet postings. I was so sure that you were a social butterfly!

Although I have never experienced bullying in s purely psychological form, perhaps you will permit me to doubt that it can be so very different than the form where there is a liberal admixture of brute force. Can it really be so simply solved as to ignore a single bully? Bullies do generally work in packs, often including everyone except the victim. It is not practical for most people to ignore the entire class. Even if it were possible, it seems to me that it might leave a person dangerously isolated.

How do you mean "dangerously" isolated? (There's a switch: a one-sentence post instead of an essay! )

Most everybody is extremely uncomfortable when isolated. No-one can learn the social skills required to keep a job and build a family while isolated. Dangerous stuff like that.

You can learn a lot by observation, though. You don't always need to be the one leaping off the bridge to learn that gravity works...

Well, I can't exist alone indefinitely, but for years before that I had very few friends (we knew each other very well, though), and regarded books just as good company as human baings - better, in some cases, depending on which human being you happen to be considering

Besides, almost anything is better than the misery I had been going through, trying to figure these people out, wondering why they were so mean, wondering why I was so miserable. After months of that, isolation was pleasant! Besides, it was only for maybe three more months, and then the schoolyear ended, and then we all went to different schools because that was as far up as that school went. And at my subsequent school I proceeded to make friends and be happy, and essentially ignore (but be baffled by, when I did pay attention to them) all the other girls who said I needed a makeover or I should get together with such-and-such guy or talked about their underwear over lunch. I think I'm turning out all right.

I understand Silversolstice's "psycological" bullying, at my last school I had a lot of trouble with bullying, and although some of it was physical and verbal, the worst part of it was always being excluded from the group.

Another problem is that sometimes geeks (Anyone who doesn't fit in all that well) will try to get in on the "in crowd" by abusing others, one of the worst problems I had with bullying was with a kid shorter than me, with a dodgy eye, dead parents and an interest in trainspotting. He was a natural target for other bullies, and so to improve his situation he diverted attention to me.

psycological bullying is very often a 'girl' thing. boys (normally) rely on physical strength to gain power over other boys (saying that i did meet some very verbal boys who thought i was a good target. appparently this was because they liked me but couldnt tell me. is there anyone who can explain that to me?) Anyway....the problem with psycological bullying is you cant define it. you go to tell a teacher or a parent about the bullies and they ask you for specific instances where they have done you harm and there is nothing. you say 'they were looking at me funny' or 'they laughed at me' or 'they were talking about me' or 'they didnt talk to me'. you cant pin anything down and you end up looking like an oversensitive fool who cant take it if they're not always in the central spotlight and everyone loves them. this is where being a loner can actually help. you end up saying 'fine then. dont talk to me. i dont care. i'll just work on my strange and mysterious persona' (well i did anyway) and hopefully after a while it dies down and you become a stronger person for it. the problem comes if you are a social butterfly and you do need the company of others. im not sure how to deal with it if thats the situation but i suppose the best idea would be to use the lovely social skills you have to start your own group and carry on as normal. well thats my essay done.