Bullying

[firecat]

This article discusses why children who are bullied sometimes don't discuss it with adults.

http://www.livescience.com/8994-bully-victims-suffer-silence.html

I did mention to my parents sometimes that other kids bullied me. Their response was "Ignore it, and they'll get bored and stop." I figured that this meant "We don't want to hear about it, because we don't know what to do to stop it." (This reason isn't on the list of reasons in the article.)

So I stopped talking to them about it and I pretended to ignore the bullying and to some extent I think this strategy prevented the bullying from escalating past name-calling, although it didn't stop it.

I also developed another strategy, which was essentially to be quiet and hide in plain sight. This got so ingrained that I find it difficult to turn off, which causes me problems at times.

Comments

[flarenut]

Perhaps implicit in some of the reasons the kids gave: the adults are overseeing the bullying. And complaining, just like other acts of opposition, just gets the kid labeled as a troublemaker. There is also (or at least was in my time) a huge explicit cultural prohibition on telling tales.

For the most part, I grew up in environments where the bullying wasn't too vicious, and where there were enough other strange kids that we could hang together (private school with a fair sampling of faculty brats, so being smart was not a priori a bad thing). And in high school I sort of claimed the weird-geek label first thing, so trying to tease me with it didn't really work that well. I was lucky, and it still sucked.

[firecat]

I was lucky, and it still sucked.

Same here.