[devoply]

Bullies themselves need counselling on managing their own needs and emotions rather than punishment. We focus so much on the victims, we also need to focus on the perpetrators and see them as victims as well if not of anything else than their own psychology.

[traderjane]

Western bullying literature suggests that bullying is more like a position that people step in and out of, whereas victimhood is sticky to the individual. It’s easier to predict victims than bullies, and it’s difficult to predict how long someone will remain in the bully position.

Bullying predicts general protective effects on the individual and social well-being. It also predicts that peers will rate the bully well, even when the victim rates the bully. This is to say that bullying has a big bystander component (the public reviews the act), and that bullies may do better than the normal population.

People who are both bullies and victims experience characteristics from both populations.

[Nasrudith]

Yeah in any school the anti-bullying campaigns are pathetic charades 9 out of 10 times as the amazing selective perception of teachers and faculty strikes again and again to "whatever is an annoyance to them".

That is the true reason for lasting trauma and damage to victims - why they cheer at the deaths and destitution of their tormentors decades later. Because finally the assholes get what they deserve. Those who express horror get flipped the bird because they were the same sort of complicit assholes.

[bigred100]

Frankly I think the answer is to just put children who bully in special education programs where they’re taught basic social skills. If they lack the interpersonal skills to not bully, they need remedial instruction in them.

[afandian]

Your comment has obviously split opinion here, but I think it mirrors the way that society is split in the justice debate.

Approach 1: "People who hurt other people should be hurt back"

Approach 2: "We should try to understand why people hurt other people"

I used to think these were correlated with political spectrum (approach 1 on the right, appraoch 2 on the left). But these patterns happen across the spectrum.

These two aren't easily reconcilable. Approach-2-type-people, such as myself, think that this is the only real way to reduce harm and that approach 1 only makes everything worse, and continues the cycle of abuse.

I think it's emcumbent on approach 2 to try and understand why people act like approach 1.

[chimprich]

> Approach 1: "People who hurt other people should be hurt back"

This seems to be the approach used by many (most?) people in online forums when discussing controversial topics. "Your opinion hurts me, so I'm going to be as offensive as possible in return". It doesn't seem to work very well. HN is maybe a bit more approach #2.

[NotATroll]

> I think it's emcumbent on approach 2 to try and understand why people act like approach 1.

Recidivism.

As members of the public, it's highly likely that we've both seen others be burned by trying to take approach 2. And have ourselves been burned by trying to take approach 2. After all, many crimes have very high rates of recidivism.

These experiences tend to model how we approach other people in the future.

And to be honest, it's not really a 'wrong" approach that "only makes everything worse". At some point, the question of approach 3 "removing a person from society" is a valid question when it comes to reducing harm.

[ukj]

I never quite understood the pragmatic purpose of Approach 1.

If punishment has no measurable, positive effect - why do it?

Combine with Hanlon’s razor and indeed - victims become bullies when they default to Approach 1 when harm (rather than misunderstanding) is perceived.

[luckylion]

I'm not sure those are actually opposing positions. I believe that a stronger split is how important it is to stop the behavior. Imprisoning somebody will immediately stop their behavior and will provide safety for their victims, but we don't want to use an extreme tool like prison to solve a minor infraction (like, say, shoplifting). It seems to me that the debate is often about what is appropriate, where what you describe as "Approach 1" people prefer to err in too strong a measure that makes sure the behavior is stopped, while others prefer to err on the other side, i.e. is it more important to allow a bully to go to school (or live in freedom within society for larger issues), or is it more important to protect other students from them, and how much bad behavior do we accept, how many chances do they get to alter their behavior etc?

[boomlinde]

Approach 1 seems quite natural. If I do something—in general—and find that it results in my suffering, I will normally take that into account when I consider doing the same thing again, and possibly avoid it because of it. In this sense I don't think that getting slapped or putting your hand on the stove for the first time are significantly different. You learn the consequences and adapt.

In the case of a bully, though, there may be so much at stake for the bully that it outweighs the suffering associated with getting beaten up or otherwise punished for it. Wishing to e.g. maintain his social status, he may double down instead of reacting in a way that seems appropriate given the obvious consequences. This is where I think approach 2 becomes useful. What is it that the bully thinks is at stake? etc.

Before that, who cares? Kids will be kids and will fight and bicker. That's how they learn what their boundaries and what the consequences of their actions are so that they can grow up to be healthy adults. I think that inflicting pain and suffering as a direct response to injustice may be an excellent way to keep misbehaving adults in check as well, but it seems more likely in adult age that there is an underlying psychological problem that needs to be addressed, perhaps one that could have been addressed during adolescence.

[danarmak]

> I think it's emcumbent on approach 2 to try and understand why people act like approach 1.

For many (most?) people, it's just a matter of values. Punishment of evildoers, justice, revenge, enforcement of the law, are not judged on the merits of preventing future offences, they're desirable in their own right.

These values are widespread and are part of the 'natural' or 'default' repertoire of human social behavior. Different cultures encourage them to different extents, and channel them differently, and of course differ a lot on what is offensive and deserving of punishment and how much. But I don't think it's difficult to understand why people desire these things.

Even if everyone agrees that rehabilitative justice is better for reducing crime, it's a separate moral decision to value reducing crime over other things like justice (fairness) or punishment (negative consequences for infringing on rights).

[ryannevius]

> Bullies themselves need counselling on managing their own needs and emotions rather than punishment

I'd replace "rather than" with "in addition to".

[devoply]

You really want to make a must to punish children? If you get in there early there shouldn't be an in addition to.

Prison is a final measure when all other measures have failed. Even with prison, first time offenders of non-serious crimes usually do not do time or are diverted to other programs to help them avoid this fate. I just love how all the nerds here are going crazy over letting bullies off the hook initially to try to reform them -- it's as if they all want to bully the bullies.

[luckylion]

Let's focus on the actual victims first though, and stop the bullies. There is a meta-argument with regards to free will and whether and how much choice we have in the things we do, but that's a very different discussion (albeit an interesting one) and shouldn't be confused with the one about the bully's acts and immediate (and long term) results.

[Juliate]

Taking care of the victims today does not exclude taking care of the bullies as well.

Stopping them does not mean only punishment, but counselling (and sometimes, because they were themselves victims of abuses).

[codegladiator]

> Bullies themselves need counselling on managing their own needs and emotions rather than punishment

So, criminals also, by that logic, themselves need counseling on managing their own needs and emotions rather than punishment ?

[tiew9Vii]

Yes, exactly that, everything I read says rehabilitating prisoners greatly reduces re-offending.

That’s not to say they shouldn’t go to prison for a crime. While in prison it shouldn’t be just a punishment, the isolation is the punishment, the idea should be providing the help needed inside so when they come out they do not re-offend.

[imtringued]

I hate these types of questions. It's never clear what position the person who asks the question is taking.

In favor of punishment: Victims and relatives want compensation and since it is impossible to restore every situation, especially if the perpetrator has no money, destroyed something irreplaceable or killed someone, we want them to pay with their time instead. The primary goal is making the victims happy and preventing crime can take a back seat to that.

In favor of counseling: Law enforcement lags behind the actual rule violation. Someone is a criminal only after they have committed a crime. Therefore if your policy only targets criminals then it is already too late. It can't undo any damage and it cannot prevent any future damage after the criminal has been released. When they are released the reason they committed a crime didn't disappear. The perpetrator himself obviously didn't benefit from the punishment (in other words: he doesn't need punishment). Therefore the deterrence effect completely disappears and increasingly tough punishments do not influence the recidivism rate. Now imagine instead of targeting criminals after they have committed a crime we instead try the opposite. Suddenly we gain the ability to prevent a crime which is something the punishment only route doesn't allow us to do. So yes people definitively need help so they don't have to resort to committing crimes.

[swebs]

>So, criminals also, by that logic, themselves need counseling on managing their own needs and emotions rather than punishment?

Are we reading the same Hacker News? I see that statement expressed in like every fifth thread.

[Juliate]

Actually, yes, they do.

You want this, especially when you know they will one day get out of jail.

[rzwitserloot]

Yes, they do.

What would you like the point of your country's justice system to be? To be a venue for state controlled vengeance, where the victims (or the friends and family of a victim if somebody died) get to enjoy the fact that at least the criminal got their life ruined as well?

Or would you like it to be to attempt to deal with criminals in a fashion that reduced recidivism as much as is possible, allowing for compensation of victims where reasonable and possible, but providing explicitly no vengeance-based 'compensation'?

Because a justice system is going to look radically different depending on which option you want (especially if you're trying to optimize it so it does what you want it to do well, fairly, and cheaper than alternatives) – and the anti-recidivism style leads to vastly lower levels of crime. It's also vastly cheaper for society.

When you feel outrage at a child molester getting 5 years in a comfy jail cell, getting a state-paid education to boot – that's your sense of vengeance being offended. Be aware that satisfying it is incredibly expensive.

When you feel outrage at a child molester that gets out after 15 years and strikes again soon after – that's presumably you being upset that the justice system is, based on a rather lacking 'anecdotal evidence of 1', not doing its proper job.

Even if punishment isnt the point at all, incarceration and other restrictions of personal freedoms are likely required. How do you prevent recurrence of the crime?

There are some drastic options available. You could, purely out of economic expediency, just execute all criminals. But even if you're morally okay with that drastic measure, in practice that has a lot of externalities. so, _IF_ you free criminals at some point, it makes very little sense NOT to focus on reducing recidivism rates.

One could consider the punishment itself as an anti-crime measure: Use the fact that if you are convicted of a crime, you will be punished, as a deterrence. For some types of crime it works well, but for many, it has barely any effect. Crimes of passion and sexual deviancy just aren't reduced by measurable rates by increasing the punishment if caught and convicted, for example.

Add it all up? Yes, please. Provide counsel to criminals before you consider the punishment (but, as they ARE criminals, if the most effective counsel the state can provide requires significant reductions in personal freedoms, by all means).

[dangerface]

> So, criminals also, by that logic, themselves need counseling on managing their own needs and emotions rather than punishment ?

The point of prison to rehabilitate so yes. If we are just putting people in prison to get rid of them then why not actually get rid of them? If you don't believe in rehabilitation then life in prison is an expensive and cruel torture in comparison to just ending them.

[devoply]

Maybe if you counselled them and taught them how to manage their own needs and emotions many of them would not become criminals saving society many ills.

You can not eliminate the personality that needs bullying to validate themselves from the population. You can however hep them channel those needs into other things like entrepreneurship and leadership. To productively shape their needs for power over people rather than harassing and harming them.

[Dude2029]

No, they deserve to be punished. Is there counselling for rapists?

[bloak]

Oh yes. Those clever psychologists even invented a counselling system that increased the rate of reoffending from 8% to 10%:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49973318

Edit: Obviously I would be in favour of counselling that decreased the rate of reoffending.

[CapitalistCartr]

There should be. Society would be the better for it.

[squarefoot]

Bullies often reflect the environment they're grown into: bad, absent, abusive or too demanding parents etc. They should be helped before resorting to punishment, but any attempt is deemed to fail if their family refuses to cooperate, which is the most likely case since it implies admitting they suck at parenting.

[LorenPechtel]

Every bully I knew anything about their home situation the fundamental problem was parents that supported the bullying. They would punish their children for wrongdoing they observed but they categorically would not believe any wrongdoing reported by others.

A prime example, the kids next door when I was growing up. They were younger than I was and never would try anything alone but two-on-one they would sometimes. (Usually when a third troublemaker was on the scene.) One time I was defending myself against an attack with a belt, I disarmed him and threw the belt into the vines growing on our house--high enough up that it would require a ladder to reach. When the belt was recovered the buckle was missing--they called the cops saying I must have stolen it. Just from talking to them the cop figured out I was acting in self defense, I had no possible way of having stolen the buckle (the instant I had control of the belt I threw it), the buckle must have come off when I threw it, bad luck for them. If the cop could figure that out so could their parents--yet they still felt I had stolen it since it couldn't be found. (Turns out there must have been a crack-the-whip effect, the buckle came off and flew completely over our house. We found it in a flower pot on the other side of the house two years later.)

[maceurt]

I agree with you. If you are a child then you are almost entirely dependent on your home and school environment for cues on social development. If a child is bullying another kid then you can almost guarantee it is a problem with their home or with the school.

[zozbot234]

Well, guess what's the biggest "problem with (the) school" - the inability to get away from a bad environment. And you can't fix that with counseling alone - you actually have to figure out who the worst offenders are, and punish them consistently. The more you can deprive those folks of the social influence among their peers that's what they crave most, the better for everyone else.

[zozbot234]

Most of the worst/most visible bullies probably have narcissistic or sociopathic tendencies. Counseling is totally useless on those folks because they don't really have normal emotions in the first place. "Their own psychology" is all about thinking of the world in zero-sum terms, where they win if others lose.

The only approach that can partially make up for such an attitude is cognitive-behavioral training, and then only for those who are smart enough that the lessons can sink in, overcoming their distrust of others, authority figures etc.

[saagarjha]

> Counseling is totally useless on those folks because they don't really have normal emotions in the first place.

I think most bullies are not psychopaths, considering that many don’t stay bullies their entire life.

[andoofthewoods]

that's a huge assumption you're making.

Narcissists and Sociopaths make up 1% of the population each. To characterise most young bullies as narcissists/sociopaths when A - Their brains are still developing, and B - They're at an impressionable age where their sociability is highly moulded by their environment (e.g. parents) is disingenuous.

[LorenPechtel]

We don't have meaningful treatment.