Social Networks, Suicide and Statistics

In my opinion, bullying isn't an "institution", it's a fact of evolution. All social animals "bully" each other as they're growing up; there are hierarchies, dominance and submissiveness within any pack animal's social group.

Now, we're obviously a bit more rational about it then, say, a litter of wolf pups, and we can find psychological reasons behind why Person A bullies Person B, but there will always be competition in any social group. The mother wolf will step in if the Alpha male in her litter is being too rough with his litter-mates, give him a nip of her own, and he'll knock it the fuck off.

I don't think the problems we have with bullying these days have anything to do with the kids, and everything to do with us. Zero-tolerance policies in schools, for instance, serve to punish both the aggressor and the victim equally, which is ridiculous. This was true even when I was in high school 15 years ago, pre-Columbine before the bullying hysteria started really ramping up, and it's even worse today. Parents aren't disciplining their kids effectively (which is why so many bullies come from broken homes or empty ones due to chronic absentee parents chasing that big brass ring to leave their kids raised by 4Chan), and they're not noticing the signs of this behavior when the kids are young enough that the behavior can really be corrected. Our definitions of what is 'bullying' are changing all the time, too. We've become more and more sensitive on a societal level to it, and I really do think that it's become a sort of moral panic at this point. "Did Jimmy call you a doody-head?! He's a dirty BULLY AND MUST BE STOPPED!!!!!!!!! Throw his 7-year-old ass in JAIL!!!!!!!!"

I realize that's a little insensitive, and that there is much more severe forms of bullying than that, but I've heard younger parents characterize relatively innocent shit like that as bullying in conversation. Bullying is starting to come to mean any negative interaction between two kids anymore. I had my share of adversaries in school, as did most people, and while we had our dust ups, I wouldn't call the other kids bullies. We just didn't get along. That's how life is, sometimes, and guess what? It did make me stronger. It taught me how to deal with antagonistic people like that, which is a pretty useful skill, especially these days where everything has become so polarized. I learned not to let the shit get to me when I was a kid, but if we shelter kids from that shit in the misguided idea that we're going to turn school into a utopia where nobody fights with each other, they're just going to end up unable to deal with any adversity in their lives as adults. Not only are we over-sanitizing our world to the point where kids are getting sicker than they used to due to lack of exposure to germs, but we're starting to do the same thing to them socially, as well.

What happens when they start having to deal with those people when they've never learned how to deal with them before? They feel helpless, they get despondent and depressed, and they think suicide is the only solution...because they never learned how to deal with the bullshit. Their self-esteem and confidence is shot to hell because they've never had the opportunity to rise to a challenge and deal with it on their own, so when they actually are forced to deal with a situation on their own, they're powerless.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/jBRFxXpVjdY/social-networks-suicide-and-statistics

john wayne gacy amr jack del rio fired jack del rio fired made in america made in america icam