Remember when "bullying" entailed physical assault?

[Master_of_Oldskool]

So, little though I want to get involved in a discussion of nerd culture considering the absolute shitstorm that topic has been over the past few months, I've noticed a trend in such discussions that bothers me. When people discuss nerd rage/exclusionary behavior/whatever, school bullying is often brought up. Usually, it's in a rather condescending or dismissive manner- "You're just bitter because you were teased for liking Star Trek" is a typical statement. And generally, it is "teased", "mocked", "picked on", or similar phrasing that implies verbal abuse. And while name-calling and mocking were a pretty significant factor in my childhood, that wasn't the full extant of it by far. I have to wonder:

Do you guys remember when it was normal to be physically assaulted for your perceived nerdiness?

I remember any number of times when, walking home from school, taking part in extracurricular activities, or just caught alone in the hall, I was tackled, pinned down, punched, stomped on, slapped around, and generally physically abused. A particular incident from elementary school sticks out in my mind, where I was hauled off the slide at recess and kicked in the stomach until I puked.

Now, I'm not saying this justifies assholery on the part of nerds. If you think that you're entitled to send rape threats to Phil Sarquinnling or whoever this week's punching bag/golden calf is because of your experiences with entirely separate people, you are a shitheel and I hope you die of German herpes. But there's this tendency to dismiss the experiences themselves as having been silly and trivial to begin with, and there are people who have actual, physical scars that say otherwise.

So, Escapists- are you old enough or from a bad enough community to remember when this sort of thing was commonplace? And if not, do you understand that it really did happen? Like, a lot?

 

[Master_of_Oldskool]

i was in "the library club". this meant we got to use the library during breaks.
at my high school no one had "a common room" bar the prefects and effectively us.

it also means most of the people there we're basically those the staff didn't want to leave without somewhere to go because of the rest of the playground would do to them...that and we probably held up the "GPA" of the entire school...personally i had my own key for "the computer room"...which was a room with just one computer in it...a Z80 Research Machine...which i used to write games on

but ye i was in a nerd/geek group i guess but we didn't really have a name for what we were tbh.

most normal kids played football at breaks...apart from the self styled bad asses who tended to smoke.

Think you may have accidentally posted in the wrong thread, mate. XD

 

[DC_78]

Snipp

Not to de rail this but, I was a bully.

Broken home, abuse, neglect, does not excuse it, but it was what I did throughout most of elementary and high school. By twelve I was six foot 220 lbs of mostly muscle from not eating well and running away from home only to return to a beating and lots of manual labor. If you were a "nerd" or "wimp" I and my friends would target you. It did not matter that you were just minding your own business, and God help you if you stood up to us. It does make me sick at times to think of it now.

So yes it was a real thing. I was forced into "counselling" before high school, suspended, expelled, dropped out, emancipated and re enrolled only to do it all over again. I was not happy with myself and took it out on anyone and everyone.

I credit my first wife and the Army for breaking me of this. Once I was happy with my life and myself I felt I had control of my own choices, I got better. As a person I can never undo what I did or explain away others for what they did. But I can say with some authority most bullies, are just really sad people.

 

[Vault101]

it still does at least somtimes....though imagine on some level it was more acceptible back then

 

[Master_of_Oldskool]

Think you may have accidentally posted in the wrong thread, mate. XD

don't see why. could you explain why you think so ?

i also don't agree with the suggestion that bullying has somehow been expunged or that actual physical bullying is the core type that exists.

indirect and relational aggression (aka social ostracization) is wisely practised in the social environment of a say, a high school.

The pre-edit version of your post that I quoted seemed to have little to do with the subject of the thread. Your edit made it clearer what you were trying to get across.

And I'm afraid that in my personal experience, physical abuse was the greater part of my experience with bullying. It's possible that you're too young or come from too upscale background to remember when physical bullying was commonplace and punished no more harshly than verbal or emotional attacks, but I assure you that until recently, that was very much the norm.

EDIT: Shitfuckshit. I totally missed the line in your post where you mentioned having been physically abused at home. I'm sorry if my response came off as antagonistic, my eyes just kind of skipped over that bit. Sorry.

 

[carnex]

School bullying didn't necessarily take physical for. Plenty of bullying, especially from females takes verbal form either by gossip or directly. While it can leave body unscratched psyche can be irreversibly damaged.

That said, there was plenty of attempts to bully me, I was fat nerdy kid etc. But I was always physically active and was given sound advice by older people so i dealt with them. Point always was not to wait for bullies to come together but to find them one on one and 2 by 4. Except I didn't need implements to dish out the pain. ?

Remember, point is who can take more pain, not who can dish out more.

 

[Casual Shinji]

No not really, since whenever I was bullied it was never physical and never for liking nerdy things, which at the time I wasn't even that much into. I was bullied simply for being perceived as weak/being an easy target... which I was.

 

[theevilgenius60]

They tried the physical stuff in me, for a couple years. Then I hit my growth spurt. Lets just say, that was a very satisfying year for myself and other members of the gifted class. I basically avenged myself and my nerdy friends for what had gone on before. Ah! That was a good year! I didn't pick the fights, but I ended every one of them. A stunning reversal from what had been happening just three months earlier. But yeah, as you said, bullying usually included the physical stuff, but the taunts could leave way deeper scars. Scars I'm still trying to heal to this day.

 

[Bat Vader]

I was bullied in elementary school but when I started middle school I got smart and started making friends and hanging around any staff member I could. Most bullies aren't dumb enough to try and bully someone in view of their superiors. Funny enough a guy named Jason Smith who bullied me in high school was a complete idiot and shoved me pretty hard while the principal and I were talking.

He got suspended and from what I heard dropped out not long after that.

 

[Fdzzaigl]

During most of primary school and the first few years of highschool I often got bullied in a physical way due to having ginger hair, usually in a "6vs1" kind of way. This went on until I, normally a non-violent kind of person, exploded and punched them all into the ground.

However, I would never say that bullying ever entailed "physical violence" by default. Even when physical violence is involved, it is never the worst part of bullying. The worst part is that no one bothers to help you and even former friends turn their backs to you. That you are placed in a situation where you're all alone, because others are too afraid to lose face if they do stand up to the bullies.

As there's no escape from them in cyberspace anywhere, people who are seriously bullied over social media and the like nowadays could be even worse off than before.

 

[briankoontz]

I actually had no idea that physical assault (at least at school) was even a crime as I grew up in the 1980s in a small town in the Midwest of the United States. There was either no punishment or very minor punishment of beatings, seemingly regardless of the extremity - some included concussions or worse.

Looking back on it, it was a goddamned hellhole and all adults involved at the time should feel terrible shame. I have very little respect for my hometown as a result.

The really sad thing is, when we teach children that physical assault is ok or at worst a minor infraction we shouldn't be surprised at the rates of domestic abuse and other types of abuse as they get older. If school is a place to TEACH children then they can logically claim that they learned their lessons all too well.

 

[Drizzitdude]

When I was in school I can only say I was only physically assaulted once. It was on a bus ride home and I embarrassed the kid hardcore when I put him in a hold and made him have to ask calmly to be let go before I would. Then he tried to attack me again and I hit him into a pole. I wasn't bothered much after that.


Most abuse I ever received for being a nerd was verbal, or non violent but still douchey things such as the 'accidental' knocking of the stuff from your hand that occurred. Surprisingly by the time I reached high school though I had ZERO problems relating to nerd culture. Everything that has once been frowned upon such as trading cards or handheld games was suddenly cool again for no good reason (or maybe people just stopped caring? I don't know). Hell, the kid who was later voted prom king once saw I had an old Dranzer beyblade in my bag during homeroom proceeded to bring his Dragoon and a stadium the next day, absolutely no shame in playing with decade old kids toys in a room full of our peers.

 

[BanicRhys]

Is this just an American/old people thing?

Growing up, I was handed more than than my fair share of verbal (and a little sexual) abuse, but neither I, nor anyone I knew of, was never physically abused, ever.

I'm 21.

 

[Twintix]

I also disagree with the notion that bullying needs to be physical to count as bullying. But that might not be what you were getting at. Please tell me if I misunderstood your post.

Middle school was not a fun time for me. The boys bullied me because reasons and the girls deliberately ostracized me for not liking horses. It probably wasn't as bad as bullying can be for some people, but it was enough to destroy my self-esteem. The boys called me names, shot paper balls in my hair, shone a laser light into my eyes and poked me in the back with a sharpened pencil repeatedly. The girls talked smack about me behind my back and refused to let me take part in conversations. I didn't really tell the teachers because they probably wouldn't care: I was teased an entire lesson by one of the boys, in full sight of a substitute teacher. She chose to pretend like nothing was happening. The staff on that school were mostly terrible. Not to mention, being a tattletale might just make the situation worse.

I guess it was all made worse by the fact that one of my closest friends had a tendency to treat me like shit; She never took responsibility for anything, she lashed out at the slightest provocation and always blamed me whenever anything went wrong between us. She was also a bit of a self-centered hypocrite: She basically told me to "suck it up and stop whining" and "No wonder you don't have any friends" when I told her about being harassed during a trip to a secondary school, only to immediately start whining about having to sit next to a boy she didn't like on the bus home. Who, from my understanding, hadn't done anything to her.

I'm lucky to have a pair of wondeful parents who I could talk to and who helped me through middle school. But I still have trouble talking to people and starting conversations because of this, something I never had problems with when I was younger. So bullying doesn't have to be physical to leave marks. Girls are masters of manipulation; They don't have to hit you to make you feel stepped on.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Oh, yes.

To be fair I only had that happen a handful of times, most of my torment was verbal or theft. I knew someone who had it way worse than me every recess in Grade 7-8, constantly running from this crowd of jerks trying to find him and beat up on him. I never found out why, but I wish I could have had the courage then to yell at them to stop. Or make them stop.

I think in High School as our bodies develop, bullies shift into the verbal or 'prank' forms more and more since most of them don't have mandatory outdoor recess and beating someone up isn't always an easy prospect any more, nor would it be possible to do away from prying eyes while indoors unless you hide in wait for people in the bathroom (apparently this happened once at my High School, but not to me). Also some people become more sensitive and thus more vulnerable to that. If the stories are to be believed this is even more frequent with girls- I never saw them giving or getting physical punishment in Elementary.

 

[tippy2k2]

I'm 28 so my middle school and high school days were right in the 90's for reference

While there was more physical bullying back then (or at least I presume so based on what people tell me since I haven't been to high school since 2004), I do feel that people over-play the amount of physical bullying that existed.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it didn't exist. It's just when I think back to my time, I was the kid that is the one you would not have been surprised to hear how he snapped and shot the school up. I had a minimal amount of friends and a lot of bullies. Generally, the bullies were just plain verbal and mean in a mental way (snide comments, talking about you, etc.). There was some physical stuff as rabbit punches in the hallway were somewhat common but the super ass kicking never really existed for me.

Now granted, this might be because I fought back. I'm wasn't a big kid (unless being fat counts!) but I'm not the kind of person who will sit back and take abuse. I can even think of the specific "fight back" moment and after that, there was minimal bullying. The fight back was incredibly ineffective (I don't believe I landed a punch) but I think the act of fighting back alone made me a stronger target than the bully wanted to deal with. Either that or a strange "bully respect points" was gained...