[cannaceo]

"Solve the problem yourself". Yeah, you've never had to deal with being chased by bullies and having the shit kicked out of you for no reason. Bullying is not a conflict between peers anymore than a woman getting raped is a conflict between peers.

As an adult these problems are solved for you by either human resources, the police, or being able to avoid the situation. Maybe that's why you don't walk around the rough part of town alone at night. As a kid you have no control over your environment.

[MrJohz]

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I was bullied as a child, and honestly, the problem is hard to deal with. I was not good at socialising, I found it difficult to read social cues, and I was kind of irritating a lot of the time. None of that excuses bullying, of course, but ultimately a large part of what caused that bullying was my own behaviour. If I'd have been more socially adept, if I'd realised that the social group I'd found wasn't supporting me and if I'd put more effort into making worthwhile friends, I wouldn't have been in that situation.

In the end, I needed to change for the issue to be resolved - which I did, and, along with moving to a new environment which helped reset a lot of my social interactions, that helped a lot. Obviously that's not some instant magic wand solution - I went through five long years of this experience, with various teachers and other adults trying to help me before things started clicking and I started being able to move on - but in my experience there aren't really many better solutions.

So, while I can't reiterate enough how unacceptable bullying is, and what a negative impact it had on those years of my life, I do agree with the previous poster: the ultimate solution to being bullied often lies in the hands of victim (n.b. not literally: I never found violence helped me), and trying to resolve the situation via visible external intervention may well have little impact. For me at least, a better social education would have made me much more prepared to deal with the issues that I faced.

[thewebcount]

But isn't one really useful way to learn by having people older and wiser than you step in and explain the situation to everyone involved? You don't just throw a bunch of math symbols at a child and say, "learn how to do arithmetic." You teach them what numbers and numerals are and how to manipulate them. You teach them easier concepts first, and then build on them. That needs to be done for both bullies and their victims, too. Most people will not "just figure it out." That's abusive in itself.

[cannaceo]

"The ultimate solution to being bullied often lies in the hands of the victim" is the reality that people who are pushing for anti-bullying measures are trying to change.

[thegrimmest]

Well, bullying is many things, and I think the exact issue is that the conversation lacks nuance. As I mentioned in my first post, conflict which is evenly matched should not be regarded the same way as conflict which is not. If you are attacked by a group of people, or someone substantially larger than you, then intervention is warranted. Ideally this intervention is carried out by older peers. If you're being bullied by one of your peers, you need to learn the skills to resolve that conflict. Sometimes escalation is the best tool, sometimes avoidance is. There's no panacea, but it's something we all need to learn.

[cannaceo]

Can you give an example of what being bullied by a peer would look like and what skills would be required to resolve that conflict?

[darkarmani]

> As I mentioned in my first post, conflict which is evenly matched should not be regarded the same way as conflict which is not.

This was covered by the paper. You are talking about Peer Victimization without bullying. Bullying is a form of peer victimization in which there is a power imbalance (size, numbers, status, etc).