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A few things to keep in mind when discussing schools and bullying:

Observing the legal obligation of confidentiality when working with students with a behavior disorder often looks exactly like, "Doing nothing" to other children and their parents. For example, modifying a behavior support plan or even having a behavior support plan is not something teachers are allowed to talk to other students or parents about.

I know that many of my students in inner-city, remote rural, and suburban schools have parents who tell them, "If somebody hits you, you hit them back!" But I cannot advocate that approach. For one thing, my experience tells me that the second hit is often done out of a blind rage. At this point, the students don't care that their return strike is out of proportion, that they are getting themselves in trouble, or that someone else might get hurt (like the teacher standing behind the student they push on the playground or trying to stand between the fighting students).

Secondly, Secret Service research finds that a high proportion of school shooters were bullied. In particular, students who struck back violently, stopped the bullying, and earned respect that way.

Which is not to say that most students in that situation do not grow up to lead healthy and productive lives. A good friend of mine who threw bullies down the stairs in middle school is a sweet guy who earned a decent officer's rank in the military, was voted Kiwanian of the Year at least once, and keeps enough firearms to arm a platoon and his attic, along with a bunch of books and maps.

Having studied the subject of bullying extensively, I believe in telling students to stand up for each other, teaching them social skills when needed, and trying to ensure that every student has an adult they trust at school.

And I live with the knowledge that no matter how good a teacher I am, somebody may shoot me anyway.

Point. Counterpoint.

One of the kids who bullied me in elementary school ended up performing a murder-suicide when he killed his parents and then killed himself. So, that wouldn't show up in the Secret Service statistics.

Now, that being said, bullying and fighting back have basically *nothing* to do with mass school shootings or murder-suicides.

The Secret Service disagreed with your conclusion.

Schools will claim they have 0% tolerance of bullying but in reality it's often not the case.

IME, Zero tolerance generally only focuses on physical aggression and seems to ignore the verbal taunting, which can actually be much more painful. I know my DS considers someone calling him a name a significantly worse "crime" than if they had hit him. Ironically, it is the "zero tolerance" policy that resulted in YOUR child getting in trouble because the verbal assault is ignored over the physical. A similar incident happened to my DS last year when a kid was relentlessly taunting him. After a while, DS pinned him (he was taking wrestling at the time) and HE got detention. I for one thought his response demonstrated a lot of control: he wanted the kid to stop, he had walked away, the kid followed him, so he took steps to defend himself without actually injuring the other child. But it was "physical aggression" and the detention form listed "attention seeking" as the reason. I was livid!

I hope the school does a better job of monitoring things for your child from now on!

RE the Secret Service study, I haven't read it, but it seems to me that it is similar to the argument that "many serial killers were adopted, therefore adoption leads to serial killing". The N for school shooters is really small. The overwhelming majority of students who fought back against bullies, did NOT become school shooters. And, there is likely another factor present in these kids that makes that kind of violence seem reasonable when it would not for most.

That said, I think fighting back should be a last resort. However, this requires a school that is willing and able to provide students with real alternatives for protecting themselves and preventing bullying.

Another valid way of interpreting the Secret Service data is that when schools repeatedly ignore bullying and fail to intervene appropriately, some children will, in desperation, take matters into their own hands, with some success. Some of them fight back, others learn to skip school or feign illness to escape the situation, others somaticize their stress and develop real physical distress (ulcers, headaches) which keep them out of school. Most children take away a lesson from repeated bullying: that they are on their own and the authority figures in their lives are either unwilling or unable to help them.

If the cycle of bullying recurs or escalates in higher grades and the school again repeatedly fails to take effective action, (which is likely if the school system as a whole does not actively discourage bullying, or if, as happens in some areas, the system actively, if sometimes unwittingly, encourages bullying) some children who feel trapped and helpless may escalate the intensity of their responses in an attempt to escape an intolerable situation, and, if these signs are again ignored, this may, in rare cases, particularly where the children are taking medications that increase aggression and decrease impulse control, lead to severe violence against the perpetrators of the bullying. Much more frequently, however, the violence seen in victims of bullying is directed against themselves. Children who have been bullied are at far greater risk for suicide and major depression than they are for violence directed against others.

Telling children that they cannot fight back even in a situation where they feel physically threatened only decreases their sense of empowerment and self-efficacy. But a child at school shouldn't ever have to respond in this way, because the supervising adults should deal with the bullying before it gets to the point where a child feels the need to resort to violence. If the adults at the school where the OP's child attends had been doing their jobs, this situation would not have arisen, and if it had somehow slipped past the radar, the response should not have been to validate the bully's behavior while punishing the victim.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to predict that some people who have responded violently to bullying in the past might respond violently to bullying in the future. A very few of these violent responses might be disproportionate. But the appropriate response to this information is not to blame the child who responds violently and admonish children to tolerate bullies, it is for the adults in the child's life to take steps to stop the bullying and show the child not only through words but through actions that there are effective and readily accessible civil alternatives to a violent response. Children at school don't have the freedom to leave to avoid bullies, so the adults who place them in this situation need to take responsibility for protecting them.

You can also provoke people into attacking you with words, not fight back, and then have them get suspended.

I did this once. Got a broken nose, though.

It's not the safest course of action, but it does work.

Note: My intent was not to get a broken nose or provoke a fight. There are just certain things you shouldn't say to certain people. I don't recommend that viewers try this at home.

Most of the kids who commit suicide or who plan to commit mass murder were bullied at school and elsewhere. They also had no adults to turn to or their parents were distant. They then let the resentment build up while they constructed revenge scenarios which they then acted out.

The verbal stuff precedes most violence. This is when it should be stopped.

As a kid who moved around a lot and who was a target the first few days in school, the physical stuff does happen - both the threat of violence and violence itself.

I've also watched kids in daycare settings and in birthday parties or other mass amusements and I see it occur regularly there. These take just a few seconds to occur and are often missed by adults and kids often ignore that it occurred.

Isolate each girl in a given class setting with a trusted adult and she will tell you who the bullies are. The boys will be too ashamed to admit it that they were bullied to most. And the bully will lie and tell you its someone else.

And size is no object. I've seen small boys taunt someone and then haul off and hit them - sometimes the biggest kids. And I've seen girls to this to both sexes. Sometimes its hard to see as it involves sharpened pencils or a hard pinch or rubbing the skin or pulling hair or shutting a door on someone.

When kids move into HS it gets much more violent. Many "jocks" will beat up the other kids. And the school will look the other way.

In my HS my football teammates would laugh about smashing the "geeks" into lockers. When I reminded them that these guys were my friends and that they should lay off it, they did. But the coach heard them too and said nothing.

Again, the popular girls will know who the bullies are. Just ask them to list who bullies whom and how.

In between striking back violently and tolerating bullying, there are a whole bunch of options.

Most bullying takes place where adults aren't around. I'll never forget the parent-teacher conference where the parent asked what we were going to do about the bullying. We hadn't heard about the bullying, so we called the kid in and asked where it was happening. "At the bus stop." As I recall, someone talked to the bus driver, but even the bus driver can only do so much before the bus arrives or after the bus leaves.

http://www.bullyingprevention.org/repository//Best%20Practices%20PDFs/olweus%20bullying%20circle.pdf

When I present "The Bullying Circle" to my classes, most students will admit to have playing at least three roles at some point in their lives. Some tell me, "I've been every person on this chart."

For a systemic approach, from a school's point of view, all the kids who aren't either the bully or the target are the key to stopping bullying. And this is why experts say kids should work on making a few good friends. It's certainly true that the new kids, the gifted kids, and the disabled kids are at a disadvantage here.

This is especially true in middle school and upper elementary where much of the bullying behaviors seem to be sorting out a pecking order, and people bully or support bullying as an attempt to fit in. And since the bullies are often the most popular kids in the class, it can take a teacher by surprise to find out who is doing the bullying.

I think of the time I found a Central American, Non-English Proficient student cowering in a corner of the girls room when the teacher's sink was broken, and a bilingual student talking to her. Turned out one of our soccer players, a good student, had passed her a threatening note. I was flabbergasted, but we talked to the soccer star, and the bullying stopped.

Most targets would not tell a teacher they were being bullied for anything. For that matter, there was a school shooting in 1997 where a couple dozen students knew it was going to happen beforehand, and nobody told an adult. This is why I say it's important to build that trust and keep those lines of communication open between kids and adults.

Wow, Beckee and Austin, your posts describe a level of bullying that I fortunately have not seen!

I have been lucky with my DS's that I have only observed real, ongoing bullying in one setting: a park district summer camp my boys were enrolled in last summer. Even after I discussed the situation with the leaders, nothing changed and the only person who ever got in trouble was my ds on the few occasions that he did lash out in retaliation. They claimed that they talked to the kids, but there were just too many kids for them to catch all the situations.
On the other hand, we moved the boys to a YMCA camp, and had zero problems with bullying. In my view, the Y just set better expectations about how people should treat each other. I think this really demonstrates the power the school or organization can in preventing these behaviors.