To think that bullying is rarely as black and white as it’s made out to be in here

[PorkFlute]

For context neither of my children have ever been accused of bullying or subject to bullying so I have no personal bias.
I have worked in a lot of schools though and come across many situations where parents are adamant that their child is being bullied or excluded when what is actually the case is that other children don’t want to play with their child because they are excessively bossy, mean or spoil games. Not playing with someone in this case isn’t exclusion imo and social skills support for the child who is behaving in a way that puts other children off is what is needed. There are also cases where children are ridiculously over sensitive or there is unkindness on both sides.
Obviously bullying does happen and it’s awful but on here people seem to jump straight to the conclusion that bullying is taking place and schools aren’t acting often only on the word and interpretation of the accuser.
Aibu to think that actual bullying ie purposeful and persistent victimisation is actually pretty rare with young children at least?

Bruffin maybe not in your experience but where I come from you were absolutely judged on what you didn't have/parents couldn't afford, by those who were obviously very privileged and this was just more shit to throw at my friends and I. Obviously just another excuse to bully but there you go.

Stayandfight, yes I would absolutely agree that as you say it was an altercation and not bullying and i'm glad that it has been resolved and the boys have moved on.

This is the sort of thing though that by some could have been called bullying when it wasn't, the boy and his parents could have framed him as a victim and things could snowball. So maybe if your son quite innocentlywent near him in the playground, or laughed near him or looked at him, your son could be accused of intimidation. Your son then gets annoyed at being pulled up all the time by teachers, painted as a bully and so now there really IS malicious feeling where there was none before.

So perhaps being quick to call things bullying and handling things poorly can create problems.

Lost the OP again?!

I have not read all the posts but I think this is quite a coast topic.

@hungryhippo90 Ivan so sorry your experience was so bad. Can you access some counselling on NHS? I think you are amazing to come through that and speak so eloquently on such a terrible time.

@CaptainMarvelDanvers really sorry for what happened to you and to all who were bullied. It's always utterly wrong.

You can never have a serious discussion on here about bullying. A proper unemotional conversation would really help what is a serious and damaging issue but it always gets side tracked by the poor me stories!

Sinisterbumface
That is far too simplistic, some poor kids get bullied by rich kids. Dome rich kids get buliied by poor kids. Some poor kids never get bullied or brush it off so its a one off etc etc

You can never have a serious discussion on here about bullying. A proper unemotional conversation would really help what is a serious and damaging issue but it always gets side tracked by the poor me stories!

Sophie perhaps you should start a thread stating exactly that. The beginning of this thread was quite one sided, sometimes adults forget how bullying happens, especially if they didn't experience it themselves. Some posters, including myself have shared their stories as an insight to how chipped are experiencing bullying, rather than adults limited perception. Dismissing these as "poor me" stories is belittling and unnecessary, presumably you wouldn't do that on a thread about domestic violence or sexual abuse, but victims of bullying are fair game?

I think it needs to be made quite clear what bullying is. From the Anti Bullying Alliance it's defined as:
"the repetitive, intentional hurting of one person or group by another person or group, where the relationship involves an imbalance of power. It can happen face to face or online"
www.anti-bullyingalliance.org.uk/tools-information/all-about-bullying/what-bullying/aba-definition-bullying

It isn't kids just falling out with each other one minute and mates the next. It is repetitive, intentional, and makes the bully feel powerful and the bullied to feel worthless.

In my experience both as a professional and a parent, there are cases in every school of bullying as defined above but also kids learning how to interact.

Pressed return too soon! Whoops!

Kids learning how to interact means they will occasionally be unkind, hurtful, sensitive, upset, brusque, uncaring etc, as they learn how to interact with each other. They will also (hopefully) learn to be kind, caring, sharing individuals. However many adults are still learning to do this, and emotional maturity is something that you learn over time.

My friend frequently tells people she was bullied at school by people who are still my friends. She’s 40.

There was no bullying, she just wasn’t liked by a lot of people because she was an attention seeking drama queen, and being a victim was just part of that.

I completely disagree. How was it my fault I was given Chinese burns in reception every break time by a child in yr 2. How was it my fault I was regularly told I was fat, or called names because I wore glasses passed.

For anyone who was routinely bullied throughout school, it is exactly the attitude of the OP and of many other posters that condons bullying behaviour, that allows it to continue.

Herewego nowhere on this thread has anyone stated that bullying does not happen or victims of bullying bring it on themselves.

Are you of the view that if someone, anyone says they or their child are bullied then they are being bullied. End of story? With no exploration of what actually happened, or looking at the interaction from the perspective of others who witnessed it?

I was bullied on and off in primary school, then it went up quite a few levels in the third year of secondary.

I'd say it was mostly black and white. I was well behaved, quiet, unfashionable and liked books. I did verbally defend myself in primary school but that just led to the headmistress saying the bullying was half my fault so I shut up after that.

In secondary school I was being headbutted in the stomach, having chairs thrown at me, food rubbed in my hair etc plus lots of verbal abuse and ostracized by my whole year. Pretty sure there's no excuse for that even if someone's social skills are a bit lacking. The school didn't give a shit, and in fact made things worse for me, so, I again learnt to keep my mouth shut.

Of course it's not always clear cut, and of course it's difficult if a child is being ostracized - you can't make children be friends with each other, and to be honest after the bullying when I was 13 I developed quite a bad attitude towards my peers and didn't like them any more than they appeared to like me.

It's often not black abd white.
I have seen all the following as a teacher:

• Horrible nasty bullying, clearly targeting a child on a regular basis
• Unkind child who nobody wants to socialise with because they are unkind. Home call school and give us a list of names their darling wants 'to be friends with but are so mean'. Turns out that list matches the kids little darling is horrible to
• sly bullies who manipulate situations so when the victims stand up for themselves (or in the case of our school, often other kids in the year stick up for the victim and help them report it) the bully goes home claiming they are being victimised by the year
• child's name comes up in multiple bullying investigation linked to a range of different children. Home raise a formal complaint because teachers are targeting and bullying their
• kids bickering on social media at the weekend. Home call school and demand to know what we are doing about their child's friendshio issues out of school
• group of lads arranged to meet up out of school to fight. That's also apparently bullying and our responsibility to deal with. parents keeping an eye on their 12 year old kids on a weekend asks too much
• normal friendship issues being reportrd as bullying. By the time we start a bullying investigation within 48 hours suddenly they are friends again

Bullying happens and it's horrible.
Not everything people claim is bullying is bullying
Sometimes bullies get quite crafty at playing adults so the victims get in trouble too.

I was bullied.
I was quiet, geeky, unfashionable and socially awkward.
I didn't deserve to be spat on, humiliated, to have people pretend to be nice so they could laugh at me for thinking anyone could like me, to be sexually assaulted, and basically just chipped away at for years.
I've seen plenty of this sort of bullying. It is black and white, and it isn't excusable.

It's not either/or. Sometimes it is black and white. Sometimes it isn't.

I meant certain types of bullying are black and white, not everything described as bullying of course. OP makes a valid point, but think he/she underplays the existence of plain old-fashioned bullying.

I think a lot of people are missing the point. Nobody has tried to minimise genuine bullying, or claimed the victims have always brought it on themselves. Just that sometimes people are ott about calling bully for any minor disagreement. And at other times bullying can take the form of framing the victim as the guilty party, double whammy because not only are they a victim but they are punished for supposedly bullying their tormentor.

You do expect the odd bit of teasing, or kids being told "no we don't want to play with you". It's unpleasant, but it's normal. All that happened at my Primary, but there were no sustained campaigns against anyone. When teachers randomly assigned seats at tables, yeah, it sucked if you weren't next to a good friend, but you could still chat and share stationery with whoever you were next to. I wasn't overly popular as I was quiet and a bit weird in that I liked to play by myself at break (a couple of my teachers wanted me assessed, but my folks said no as I was doing well education-wise).

Y7 was like being dropped in the Hunger Games in comparison. I had a target painted on my back from day one. I got spat on, groped, beaten up, called dyke, cunt, whore etc. This went on for years BTW. These kids can't have had a "bully" switch flipped in them the day they started Secondary, I doubt it was coincidence they largely came from the Primary attached to the Secondary.

There are clear cases of black and white bullying, but there is also a grey area.

When I was at primary school, there was a girl who nobody really liked. Right from the beginning of reception, she was very bossy and would physically hurt people who didn't let her control the game. She didn't target anyone in particular and as far as I can remember, nobody ever accused her of bullying, but nobody wanted to play with her. She tried to join my friendship group in Year 3, and we let her at first but we wouldn't let her dictate everything we did so she moved on to a different group. She went through several friendship groups before her parents moved her to a different school in year 4 or 5 because she was being bullied and excluded. I don't think she was being bullied, but I understand why it upset her and upset her parents.

I think what I meant about it not being black and white is that sometimes the ‘victim’ is being excluded due to their own bullying behaviour. I don’t think there is any excuse for being unkind to someone but children not wanting to play with a child who regularly hurts them, is mean, bossy, spoils games etc isn’t bullying imo. There are obviously cases where exclusion IS bullying for eg a ringleader decides someone’s face doesn’t fit and encourages others to avoid them. But a child being left out isn’t always bullying imo. Sometimes they are left out because they are the bully.

OP, what did you hope to learn from starting this thread and is that any different to what you have learnt from it?

You've said that your kids haven't been bullied, so you don't know that gut wrenching sickness when you stand at the school gate in the morning knowing that your child or teenager or whatever is going to suffer in there, all day, and the day after, and the day after that and that the adults meant to be helping them are saying "well, you know, its not all black and white ..."

Its a bit of a pointless expression, of course not everything is clear cut, I think its quite insulting to say that people whose kids are bullied THINK everything is clear! But I have to say that people that normally feel the need to use that expression, often school staff, rather than just being inclined to state the obvious, also feel that to be bullied somehow means your character is flawed, that those who are not bullied are in some way "better" - for example, bullied kids take up lots of time and effort, their parents often come into the school and want to talk - all stuff that teachers would rather not deal with.

My DD is nearly 17 and she left the school where she was bullied 2 and a half years ago - the sight of any of the girls involved in the street still makes her sick with fear and worry, she says she hates herself for feeling like that. I don't really have any time or sympathy for adults who want to talk about things not being black and white. Yeah, ok then.

But Staples what you describe happened to your daughter was bullying, no doubt about it. It should be called bullying and should have been dealt with as such.

Several examples on this thread have not been bullying, but have been called so.

How would it have made you feel if one of your daughter's bullies had been able to successfully manipulate a situation which painted your daughter as the bully?

How might you feel about families who diverted large amounts of the teacher's time away from dealing with your daughter's genuine bullying issue by insisting that Penny is bullying Jenny, no Jenny is bullying Penny, when really Jenny and Penny are just on/off friends?

There is bullying that goes on within friendship groups for years which could be miss construed as friends falling out when the group decides to more ferociously ostracise the victim to the point where he or she tells someone. And then in a few days the group welcomes the victim back, who is relieved to have their friends back again, until the next punishment. Cats Eye by Margaret Atwood is a good fictionalisation example of this.