Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional boo hoo hoo detention already....

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.