If someone attacks me as an adult, I have every right to defend myself. The police will be called, and if it's possible to identify the perpetrator and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they attacked me, they will go to jail. If the police aren't able to find the attacker or prove that they did it, then I'm allowed to take countermeasures such as avoiding the area, carrying some sort of defensive measures (pepper spray, or even just a gun), or having someone escort me.

Do the same thing to a child, and there's often minimal punishment, the victim and perpetrator are not separated from each other in the long term, and the victim is strongly encouraged not to fight back.

Can you imagine telling a victim of a mugging (or worse) to "just ignore them" the next time it happens?

We create these Lord of the Flies type situations for children, then basically tell them that problems shouldn't be happening, if they are then we won't help, but the children shouldn't do anything about them either. And then we are shocked, shocked, when children suddenly go all psycho on their tormentors.

If a business had a constant known problem with physical violence among its employees and patrons, they'd be forced to reform or shut down, and people would go to prison. Schools should be the same. It's the responsibility of the people in charge to keep the students safe, both from outside threats and from each other. If they can't do that, then they need to be replaced by people who can.

Until and unless that ever happens, then students' best option will be to retaliate.

If they tell a kid to fight back, they are opening themselves up for trouble. Their best option is to tell everyone to stop fighting, and hope the problem goes away.

This problem can be solved. The trouble is that it probably requires money, which taxpayers really hate to provide.

Fights happen at school all the time...so it seems normal.

Normal masculine teasing is a two player game and if the players aren't experienced enough to play, dumb stuff gets out of hand. Happens in adult settings too where practical joke wars get out of hand, for example. So adult-ish male jokes around with adult-ish male, "yer mom" jokes are exchanged, its all cool.

Inexperienced jock kid calls inexperienced nerd kid a nerd, jock kid stands there waiting "he's supposed to "yer mom" me back" meanwhile nerd kid panics and starts looking for a safe space. And sometimes it escalates.

And that's why adult teachers, especially male teachers, used to ignore bullying. So as a grown adult I'm supposed to tell the nerd kid how to "yer mom" the jock kid? Can't you kids figure this stuff out on your own like 99% of the population? Clearly not...

But sure, it's just kids being dumb and silly.

Humans are naturally physical animals. Get some toddlers together, and (in addition to lots of other nice behavior like sharing and talking), they will push, grab, hit, etc. each other. We're primates and we do primate-y things.

As we get older, we learn the mores of our culture and learn to not physically interact with people in this way, but that process takes a lot of time. Kids haven't completed it yet (some adults never do). In the meantime, we have to provide an environment that handles the fact that they are behaviorally different from respectable, trustworthy adults.

Above, you say "We create these Lord of the Flies type situations for children", but the whole point of Lord of the Flies is that savagery is how children naturally act when taken outside of the strictures of society.

A Lord of Flies situation doesn't have to be manufactured by adults—it's what you get if you don't work hard to prevent it.

The fact that it's natural means nothing. It's natural for small groups of humans to make war on their neighbors, to kill their men, rape their women, and enslave their children. But we don't put up with that kind of thing now, for the most part.

I agree with your last sentence, but my question is: why aren't they working hard to prevent it? Of course children have to learn this stuff, it's clearly not innate, but if they're going through their school years being bullied then clearly they're not learning the lesson.

Now, no doubt their responsibility is different, because their brains are different. It'd be appaling to jail a kid on charges of assault for a fight in school ofc.

However, this def does not mean that getting bullied wouldn't have similarly negative effects on the kid, as it would on the adults (easily worse, given the kid's personality is only forming).

Hence, the op was suggesting, rationally, preventing it should be just as high of a priority to the school, as it would be to the judicial apparatus in the case of adult assault.

Instead, it is just normal. And that is appaling.

For instance, zero tolerance drugs policies have gotten kids suspended or expelled due to having a single tablet of aspirin in their book bag because the rule is that any medicine must be registered and administered by the school nurse, and even OTC drugs count as part of 'zero tolerance' drug policy.

The same such policy would be hard to implement for adults in a workplace.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has noticed that many bullies stopped bullying you or even became friendly with you after you made a real effort to fight back.

In American schools violence is often institutionalized. Teacher beat children, children get used to violence. The children are often not too reflected. People advocating violence as a tool for education are usually not big fans explanations and calls to reason. So children have no clue weather they are subject to education or sadism. Probably they are often at least partly subject to sadism.

And if they get used to the feeling that they are subject to the teachers sadism, it's no wonder that they see this as usual. Their educators and there for role models do, so why shouldn't they do?

Children probably do not think about what causes serious harm and what does not. Weather it was justified or not. Expically because it's only natural to assume that teachers punishment against oneself is usually not justified.

Tl;dr: if you beat children, to be surprised that said children beat other children.

/edit: disregard this, it's bullshit:

>Most urban public school systems, even in states where it is permitted, have abolished corporal punishment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment_in_...

Has this been permitted within the last 50 years? It definitely happened in the 1960s and earlier, but corporal punishment has not been a thing in American schools for a long time.

Corporal punishment is widespread in Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi schools.

Corporal punishment is routine in some schools in smaller districts of Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas.

It's only in 2011 that parents had the right to prevent their children being hit at school.

(This is all public schools. Hitting children in private schools is legal in all but 2 states.)

This isn't just children. Some 18 and 19 year olds attend schools and a subjected to physical violence as punishment.

Over 100,000 students received corporal punishment in 2011/2012. (And some of them will have been hit on more than one occasion)

http://www.corpun.com/counuss.htm

Not in the US for a long time. My father was probably one of the last teachers to actually use a paddle, and even he hadn't used it within 15 years.

For most victims, it was never a fight, it was an outright assault.

But it's how places of involuntary incarceration work.

Isn't this standard advice, to just give them your money and avoid escalating the situation?

Children in schools likely do not have weapons. It's hand-to-hand fighting with only weapons of opportunity (e.g. heavy books) available, and the provoking child likely isn't ready to use a weapon of opportunity.

Granted I'm not inherently saying that a victim should always deck a bully in the face. If that were the case, however, I'd say that child v bully has the advantage over the mugger v victim.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/06/2...

In at least one case, a serial rapist rapist walked free because he had no prior history of sexual crimes. Because prior reports were unsubstantiated since the prior victims didn't fight back.

Tried to find this article without joy. One of the bajillion I come across via RSS.

http://www.womenslawproject.org/resources/Rape%20and%20Sexua...

Many others make no mention either way, and I suspect many of them would then fall back to the traditional requirement.

Yeah, and I think it's the best advice for a one-off incident like a mugger or running into bullies in the park. Just worry about your own safety, get out of there as soon as you possibly can, and don't return. A mugger isn't the best comparison.

But what if the mugger is there every day at 6pm when you're getting out of the office? Do you just keep buying a new wallet and giving it to them every day? What if the mugger works for the same company as you, and sits 50 feet from you, and every time you walk by them to go to the bathroom they make that exaggerated knuckle-cracking gesture while staring your down and mouthing "six o'clock".

Getting bullied in the playground is one thing. It sucks. You can't go back to that park without being beaten up. But if the bully is in your school then your parents, teachers, government all mandate that you see that bully 5 days out of the week.

While some fraction would then escalate to rendering their victims unable to shoot prior to approaching, I think a greater fraction would simply choose a less confrontational way to acquire spending money. Those who did not change tactics would eventually get shot.

If the prey people change tactics, so will the predator people. Shooting the muggers tends to produce a wilier, more dangerous, harder-to-shoot breed of mugger. There will be fewer of them, but instead of waving their knife in your face, they will bash the back of your head with a rock. While you are out, they will photograph everything in your wallet before putting it right back in your pocket, and take just your phone and gun. Then if you don't report all your cards as stolen, someone buys your details from a darkweb site, does a little social engineering, and cleans out your accounts.

If you could somehow automate the process of stealing just a little bit of money from a lot of people, all at once, all the time, that would totally disrupt...

...the banking industry.~ [cue rimshot]

Thank you. I'll be here every open mic night.

Furthermore, in most states, you do not have a legal "right" to stand your ground when attacked, you are expected to retreat if possible, and there are very frequently countersuits on the behalf of the assailant that are successful in civil courts, not to mention the criminal charges that may stem from "defending yourself" against an assailant, especially depending on how much damage you do.

It's alarming to me the number of people in this comment section who believe violence will solve a problem for children or adults. It's also alarming this "if adults were in situations like children are" analogy is getting so much attention. Kids are not adults, they lack the cognitive capacity to reason as adults, and need safe places to learn how to be humans. We're casually throwing away hundreds of years of experimental results and academic consensus on childhood because our two-minute reasoning is superior.

Come on, HN, we can do better.

You are not simply told to ignore muggers. You are told to comply with muggers because muggers are life-threatening. You are also told to fight back if they go from threatening your wallet to threatening your physical well-being. Many places will actually send out the authorities to search for and imprison muggers after you report them. You are definitely not supposed to "just ignore them," you're supposed to do what it takes to survive, then report them, and have them brought to justice.

I don't see people saying violence is a solution, only that it can sometimes be the best choice out of a bunch of bad ones if you're in a situation where the authorities have failed you and you have to fend for yourself. Me, I'm advocating the exact opposite of violence being a solution: I'm saying, repeatedly, that schools need to do more to prevent violence, precisely so children don't have to take matters into their own hands.

Come on, you can do better than this weird straw-manning.

Exactly. If a mugging turns into a kidnapping, the recommended practice is for the victim to not go with the criminal, and to fight back or attempt to escape by whatever means available.

For crime victims who are transported by criminals to a so-called "secondary crime scene", the survival statistics are much worse than in the case of a simple mugging.

So what's the solution? Not easy to decide, but if these situations are a concern best to think ahead and get appropriately prepared instead of just reacting with unrestrained violence..

Edit: one example of this back-firing:

http://crimefeed.com/2014/10/bullied-teen-charged-with-assau...

If an adult comes to tell you that they are being regularly harassed and beaten up by a coworker, will they be told to be careful about retaliation, and oh shucks since there's no direct proof of anything we can't separate you from your attacker?

No.

And I think there's a good reason (not that I particularly agree with it). People, the justice system in general, trust adults to be reasonable and act within the law so anyone who goes to a police officer and says X man attacked me is believed. With children, there's always the question in the back of the mind "did they lie to get their enemy in trouble? are they pushing boundaries? Are they just seeking attention? Are they exaggerating?"

For an adult, just your word that you were attacked is often good enough to kick start an investigation for physical evidence. For a child attacked by another child, their word is often not seen as good enough.

Modern US schooling is more-or-less intentionally training to not fight injustice, to not speak up unless spoken to, to fail to learn. Zero Tolerance policies are just one symptom. Spend some time in a classroom and you'll see the teachers favoritism, trying to be 'cool' and catering to the popular kids (and further alienating the unpopular ones), telling kids that they're wrong when they're ahead of the class and more right than the teacher wants to teach. Modern curriculums have been watered down and focus grouped into meaninglessness.

Scholae delenda est.

I started legal proceedings too. I went to a "traditional" school, so I think you are perhaps reading too much into things.

As an aside, I recommend asking for receipts for all of the expenses they are claiming and keeping track of the deadlines for the provision of paperwork. In my case, the landlord had 21 days to provide receipts or they were liable for the FULL deposit. They failed to provide receipts, admitted so in writing and then stopped talking to me entirely for a bit until I pointed out that CA law allows for automatic triple damages for landlords witholding security deposits and that they had already missed their deadline to return the required paperwork to me.

(But I was aware my latin was incorrect; I was going for the spirit of the common corruption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est)

Adults tend to be better at measuring risk as well: picking a fight with me, for example, would mean voluntarily engaging in a physical confrontation with a fully grown, professionally trained combatant who happens to be a member of the most violent species ever known to exist in the universe. If you attack me, one of us will become a murderer. There's little reason to go down that road, and I'll make sure you know it.

However, children don't really think, nor are they permitted to follow through on that kind of threat. And they tend to care more about what they are permitted to do.

My then 8-year-old son was getting punched by another boy in his class on a regular basis and the teachers couldn't do anything about it because they "didn't see it." I told him that if anyone ever hits him, pushes him or punches him again he has my permission to hit back commensurately just as hard and he would suffer no consequences - even if the school wanted to suspend him.

So the next day he got punched and he punched the other kid back in the stomach. It's been 2 years now and that kid never hit him again.

I wish I'd had someome tell me this when I was in grade school. I was ready to go when I was eight, nine years old, but had already learned "That's not acceptable behavior" and didn't fight back. Years and a lot of counseling later, I had some self esteem again.

Alas, for the bullies, he didn't mention the commensurate part... I'll spare you the gory details, but it's been close to 35 years since that fateful day and I still relish it as one of the most glorious ever.

They never bothered me again, nor did anyone else. The special ice cream with my dad that evening was the cherry on the cake...

This was in the late '80s. One of the bigger bullies came up to him in the locker room out of the blue, said "hey geek" and punched him in the chest. Amazingly calmly he replied "Don't hit me" and punched him back, pretty weakly in comparison. I remember thinking at the time "what are you, fucking insane, hitting him back?" It immediately escalated into a full-on fight with the bully getting a good eight or so hard punches in which my friend futilely tried to avoid or hit back where he could. It was stopped pretty quickly when the gym teacher arrived and put the bully in a headlock.

So even though he basically got his ass kicked, nobody ever picked on him again. At least not physically.

Bullies are like thieves, and go for the easy targets. Putting up a fight, no matter how futile at the time, will likely remove you from the list of easy targets.

For much the same reason you don't argue with an idiot.

- My HS best friend's Dad teaching us about dealing with bullies circa 1991

Being bullied (and fighting back) made me consider the philosophy of violence as a kid, and made me strong. It also taught me to stand my ground and take no shit from anyone, which was true in school, in the workplace, dealing with customer support, you name it.

Makes as much sense. This kind of dad wisdom is the brand of false "common sense" currently peddled by the Trumps and Putins of this world.

In this case, violence is being perpetrated, and the proper authorities to moderate it are either unable or unwilling. As pointed out in mikeash's excellent comment [0], there is an advocacy of "violence abstinence" being delivered to the victims. This abstinence is what the comment your responding to is addressing.

And yes, violence is a wrong thing to do, just like torture. But if violence is being done and there's no authority to moderate it, then abstinence is not necessarily a good answer to the victim.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12498743

EDIT: I stand corrected on the effectiveness of waterboarding. I just removed the portion, since it was irrelevant to my point anyway.

http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2016/may/24/tod...

"While many top officials defended the CIA’s use of waterboarding in the past, there is no irrefutable evidence the practice provides results. Experts said there are few historical accounts of success, and even those are suspect. Meanwhile, there’s scientific proof that a technique like waterboarding would affect brain function enough to make any prisoner’s statements unreliable. They may say anything to make the waterboarding stop, and could actually be physically unable to provide any cogent intelligence.

"Wilcox didn’t provide concrete proof and experts say virtually none exists. We rate the statement False."

Contrary to the movies, you don't tell them what you know about them so that they'll know when to lie.

It's a comforting fantasy that we can round up the bad guys, put them in a box and rough them up in clever ways until they reveal their evil plans. In the real world, building more Guantanamo Bays isn't going to solve any of the problems facing us. The net benefit of torture centers is negative.

To say it produces nothing just isn't true.

How do you know? Do you actually have any evidence that torture works?

pavlov provided a source above explaining that there is no evidence that torture is effective. Your response seems to just be "well they must just not be doing it right".

As an aside, I see a lot of parallels between this particular statement and the recent discussions on plea deals:

"They may say anything to make the waterboarding stop, and could actually be physically unable to provide any cogent intelligence."

Obviously the physical issues (probably) don't apply, but the use of oversized charges could be seen as a mental torture technique when phrased that way...

There is a big difference between saying "violence doesn't solve anything" and saying that "violence solves everything".

There are many situations in which a person needs to defend themselves, and reacting to physical violence with a physical response is the right thing to do. Just because this gets out of hand because some people take it too far doesn't mean that all physical responses are wrong.

I'm not sure if I believe that.

Throwing some more anecdata on the pile.

Where I (primarily) grew up, gangs weren't really a thing and most kids were middle-class and a bit of goody-two shoes. The bullies mostly bullied because of social cliques and it's what media tells kids that "popular kids" do. Find me a Disney high-school show targeted at tweens and teens where the popular/rich kids aren't bullying the nerdy/poor/"the new kid".

With kids like that - reacting with violence gets the bullying to stop. It wasn't "witty comebacks" or being ignored like the victim would do on TV. There was actual retaliation to their actions and the cause->effect was dead obvious. They don't want to be hit again, they aren't fighters, so they stopped bullying.

As a kid I moved around a lot - so I also grew up in areas where there were actual gangs. They bullied for completely different reasons. If you messed with the wrong clique, you'd have 8-12 people jump you on the way home. If you got bullied, you put up with it. Adults weren't going to help - because even the adults were scared of the gangs. You ignored it and hoped they would find someone else to bully after getting bored of you. If you retaliated with violence it would be almost certain you'd wake up in a hospital, like you said.

There is no winning move. You have to have enough social sense to accurately "judge" your bully. You could judge wrong. You may make things worse for yourself. When a bully has no problem getting physical (and has more friends than you do to back them up) is is harder to deal with than the "Disney-like bullies" that I mentioned.

Best case scenario is a caring adult with enough authority gets involved. Even then, sometimes getting an adult involved makes things worse. Got the other kid(s) in trouble? They might beat your ass to get back at you.

>If the goal is to get them bored, would "playing along" help? What if you laughed with them at their insults?

Could be seen as taunting them, resulting in a beating.

>What if you immediately curled up into a ball at imminent violence

Beat you anyways? Might take some of the fun out of beating you until you curl up in a ball, but beating you to a pulp could be its own fun for them.

>Just do nothing then? (the advice I gave, and it is also common advice)

They may continue to escalate until they get a rise out of you. If it was jeering and teasing before - it might escalate to something physical.

My solution was to drop out of school (remove myself from the equation) and go on Independent Study. It is very similar to being home schooled and I didn't have to deal with anyone. If I'm not around to bully/beat I can't be bullied/beaten. This option isn't always open to people, especially parents who refuse to let their kids be "home schooled" (because the stereotype only "dumb children" get home schooled and their child isn't dumb!)

My nephew goes to a public middle school in Los Angeles. He just had to mention gangs, I couldn't give him any advice. I told him, I would just avoid the bullies in school. If it was my kid, I would home school him.

I've never understood bullies. There's a lot of adults who are bullies. Just some mean, unhappy people in the world? It seems like every job I have ever been at has a one male, or female that just needs to cause conflict. They do it subtly, but there's always they one jerk. I hate to admit this, but my father was a bully. He was o.k. to me, but seemed to ride anyone that wasen't just like him.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fF-52tcO_Hg

[1] Ok, it's really a mockumentary ... but really well done. Seems to be influenced by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_Gz_iTuRMM

Teachers never notice vandalism or theft of pupils' property and since there's never any evidence they're not interested. If the victim responds to abuse with their fists then it can be reported to the teacher, who will believe the instigator of the verbal abuse. The abuser will have friends who will report that they heard nothing and the unprovoked attack caught them by surprise.

I wonder whether school children use smartphone apps to gather evidence these days (I left school before even mobile phones were common) and how teachers respond.

Unfortunately schools have changed policies to so called zero tolerance policies, so that any violence can result in suspension, expulsion or event arrest and juvie. This is applied unfairly, it's worse for people who are racial minorities (studies show they are significantly more likely to be suspended, expelled or arrested, and suspensions last longer, this is why brown kids get arrested when they build clocks, and white kids get scholarships), and poor kids, who's parents are more limited in defending them because they have to work, can't afford legal representation, etc.

And remember bullying doesn't have to be physical. Responding with violence may get you expelled and nothing happen to the bully.

Also for people with disabilities or just physically weaker then the bully, violence may not be feasible as a response. And if girls are doing the bullying, or being bullied, violence may violate gender norms and not be the right choice.

Of course, this only works in an environment without weapons and without excessive escalation. I'm not sure it applies to girls though, being violent for a guy is considered by other kids as manly and earns respect. If a girl snaps and punches another girl, she'll be seen as crazy and most likely bullied even more than before.

What I learned in kindergarten is this: Don't back down. Not to bullies, not to teachers, not even to the principal. It's served me well throughout my life.

Hell, even Tom Petty gets it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvlTJrNJ5lA

First, if the kid is bigger and you'd lose the fight, wait until in class then sucker punch the kid and beat on him in presence of a teacher. The teacher can prevent you from getting really hurt when the bully responds.

Second, after the fight, explain the bullying. You and the bully will end up in the principal's office. In the principal's office, sucker punch/surprise attack the guy again. This second step is to establish a pattern with the bully that he's in for a long battle if he keeps it up.

Third, after the principals office, it will be escalated to parents. Then dad would give me a high five.

The parent poster had good results fighting back, but what if it's a bigger or older kid. Tough to fight back. So my dads instructions was to fight inside the school, not at the bike racks.

I had a problem with a particular bully, that was a huge guy, but sucked in a fight, after being defeated multiple times in "fair" fights, he still kept bulling us.

So one day, I hit him inside the classroom with a chair.

This immediately stopped bullying inside the classroom, but he still kept bullying me elsewhere.

So during a field trip one day, when he started bulling me, I punched him in the ear, he grew furious and started to threathen me, so I pulled a switchblade from my pocket, and showed to him, and I was pissed off enough to do that with "honesty" (ie: it wasn't a bluff, I actually was in the mood to stab him if he continued his behaviour).

He never bullied me again. (teachers wisely put us away from each other though... and other students didn't even noticed what happened, none of the other students saw I was carrying a blade with me).

Eventually he got expelled from the school though, for other stunts he did (like showing for class at 7:00 in the morning already super drunk, and vomiting so much that you could figure what he drunk by looking at it and the smell... it was vodka mixed with Coca-Cola)

Also, once a kid kept stealing my sister stuff, and once threw my sister into some construction materials.

My sister one day took with her the ball of her mouse (remember those?), and when the kid stole her food, she waited the kid to turn around, and then promptly launched the ball against the back of his neck, knocking him immediately to the ground.

Also worked wonders, never the kid bullied my sister again.

EDIT: explaining the "bullying us" in my first phrase: in school there was several kids that went to Kung Fu school, they invited me and I joined too. The bully had the bad decision of choosing us (kung fu students) as his target, maybe unaware of that fact, thus he kept attacking us, and kept getting defeated (for example once he picked on the smallest guy of us, the guy weighed so little that he couldn't participate in kung fu competitions because he was 15kg too light for the lightest category... he defeated the bully with a continuous flurry of kicks that left the bully white t-shirt with several muddy shoeprints... the bully actually kept fighting, and another bully had to physically drag him away from the fight, otherwise he would kept advancing and getting kicked until he was seriously hurt)

That's some mad skills.

We were in the waiting area before seeing the principal about an earlier push+shove in class. He kept going on and on about how after school was over, he was gonna fuck me up, etc, etc.

I "snapped," I lost my shit and stood up and started wailing on him. Or I would have liked to, but my first few punches were wild and didn't touch him, and he was up before I knew it and suddenly I was on the ground with part of glasses frames stuck in my face. And then he kicked me a couple times before one of the secretary's pulled him away from me.

We were both suspended, and when we got back, he hunted me down and started threatening me with a tree branch. Thankfully I had friends around, and one of them punched him. That stopped him.

So fuck your "all you need to do is retaliate". What I needed was several months of fight training??? A body I knew how to control???

Had you stalked him and hit him good, he would have left you alone. But your friend retaliated for you, and he did leave you alone afterwards, so similar result.

Okay. OP's advice is no good if it's not applicable to everyone.

The lines between which types of violence "bring you respect" and which don't might not be clearly established at a young age.

There comes a point where you have to stop picking out unlikely scenarios and using them as a wet blanket.

But I'd also explain why you shouldn't play on tall staircases or leave serious wounds untreated. Maybe I'd make a terrible parent?

A sheltered child never learns how to take care of himself in the real, hostile world.

Education isn't "sheltering".

Proper education allows children to avoid or resolve hostility without resorting to violence. Not in all situations, but like you said, the other situations are "unlikely scenarios" and peaceful resolution should be preferred otherwise.

In most societies we only respect violence as a defensive measure and before it gets to that point you should do what you can do resolve the issue by other means.

Maybe, just maybe, the best response depends on the situation and the bullies?

It's great that you found a solution that works, and obviously you want to help other children achieve the same, but I don't think this implied "if everyone just did what I did, bullying would be solved" attitude is very helpful.

It matches most of my experiences with bullying, although mostly this was in the form of bullies trying to start teasing me, and giving up in disgust when they couldn't get a rise out of me. But I'm also aware that my own experiences were fairly tame, and not at all representative of other people's, which is my point.

So imagine you're a parent. Your son fights back and beats an alleged bully into the hospital in front of witnesses, including teachers. Your son is expelled, the police took him into custody and charged him with felony assault, and the alleged bully's parents have filed a lawsuit against you and your spouse personally for thousands of dollars in medical expenses plus punitive damages for pain and suffering.

So now you're going to have to shell out money to bail your son out, you're going to have to hire a criminal defense attorney to try and keep your son out of state penitentiary, and you're going to have to hire a civil defense attorney to defend against the alleged bully's lawsuit. Oh, and the economy isn't going so great either. Remember that you can only get a court-appointed criminal attorney if you're absolutely indigent, and there's no such thing as a court-appointed civil attorney because the constitutional right to an attorney only applies to criminal cases.

Unless you are filthy rich, you are not going to be able to afford to sue the school. Even if you were rich enough to sue the school while defending yourself on multiple fronts, you don't have much of a case. There will be multiple witnesses, including teachers, to the fact that your son beat the shit out of another student, but no witnesses to the other kid bullying your son. Bullies are smarter than you think: most of them know to only bully people when nobody's watching. That's how they get away with it.

The best-case scenario is that your son accepts a plea bargain for misdemeanor assault, serving probation and community service, and you settle with the other kid's lawyers for somewhat less than they're asking but still enough to cover the other kid's hospital bills. You sell the house to pay for the lawyers and the settlement, you move into a tiny apartment in a dangerous neighborhood, and maybe if your son is really lucky, you'll have just enough money left over that he can get his GED. College won't happen, and he'll be lucky to get even a low-level retail job until he finishes his probation and the conviction is expunged.

Yeah, it sucks, but that's how the world works.

If so, what recourse do bullied children have these days that minimizes the risk of bankrupting their families and landing them in juvie, merely for the crime of defending themselves because someone decided to prey on them?

We actually become pretty good friends for a few years after that, and I was one of the only guys he wouldn't try to hassle even when he was having real problems. Like you, heavily anecdotal, but a lot of cultures outside of the (last 50 or so years) in the US recognize the value of non-injurious physical confrontations, especially among young guys.

I wasn't bullied, but I definitely had attempts made. Those attempts were usually resolved very quickly and permanently with a bit of school yard fisticuffs. My friends who didn't fight back physically stayed tormented for as long as they cared not to defend themselves. Arguing, going to teachers, parents, school administrators, counselors, none of it made a lick of difference. Physically fighting back did.

There were two things I think that made it possible for this to work however (my parents were informed by a healthy disdain for the public school system):

1. My father established a standing set of rules in my family about bullies. a) Don't be a bully or you'll get severely punished b) if you are getting bullied, you may reasonably defend yourself without worrying about getting in trouble at home c) you may reasonably defend another person who is getting bullied without worrying about getting in trouble at home. d) if you throw the first punch you'll get in trouble, but you don't have to "win", just defend yourself

2. My father taught me and my siblings how to box a little - basic punches, blocks, parries, enough to be more trouble than it was worth for a school yard tussle.

It worked, I was the perfect bully target in school, smart, bookish, glasses, I never was the victim of bullying after the first return punch.

But I saw other children be bullied mercilessly, beat up, made fun of, even getting urinated on in one occasion, and another pushed head first down a flight of stairs. The problem with defending them of course, is that once I'm not there the bullies will pounce. I've even lost friends who had to move away to go to another school district the bullying was so bad.

There are occasions though where this doesn't work, when the bully returns with a group, or if the parents don't teach and support their child's ability to enter, engage and resolve this kind of conflict on their own terms. Many very well meaning parents cannot imagine their child getting into a school yard fight to defend themselves and try to work through other adults at their level. But it very rarely resolves that way.

Basically I found trying that when your bullies are hardcore norteño gangbangers and you are 130lbs soaking wet with zero self confidence - and well it doesn't work out and it only infuriated them even more.

The key though is: If you are going to take a beating, then fight back and if you get your ass beat, you get your ass beat - at least 30 years later you will not look back on yourself in those moments with disgust, because only later did you decide to stand up for yourself.

Speaking from experience: yes. Nothing prevents violence and bullying more than to show the bullies "okay, you don't stop, so I'm gonna fight back". It's like with preventing a computer system from getting hacked by everone and their dog: raise the difficulty bar enough to chase away the masses.

Downside: bullies are going to choose an easier target, most probably the only friends you have (which makes that decision definitely harder).

Solidarity in a group of bullied kids tends to vary, too. Sometimes, they'll stick together and actually beat one bully so hard he's going to the hospital and staying there, and sometimes it's "okay, choose the guy next to me, kthxbai" (aka everyone fights for himself only).

In other words, I feel like the "snapping" is just as important -- if not more -- than the violence, per se.

I'm reminded of an anecdote which I think is attributed to Robert McNamara. Basically, he claims that a nuclear power shouldn't appear too rational. Adversaries should be left with a sense of "they're just crazy enough to use it". I think the same goes with bullying: "he's just crazy enough to actually kill me over this".

What if you are being bullied by someone who you can't really hurt all that much or prevent them from hurting you, except through higher channels?

There's a big difference between responding to physical bullying with force, and responding to people ignoring you and not allowing you to sit with them with violence.

At the end of the day, as unfair as it is, you're going to be the one that looks like the bully.

Edit: I'm being down-voted... but the app is meant to be a reaction to social/psychological bullying and not violence. Violence isn't appropriate here.

Anecdotal, as every case of bullying is different, but it seems to be the more efficient solution than telling the teachers/administration, who do little to nothing about it.

I'm imagining you as a 7th grader patiently sitting there and counting out 40 punches. That sounds like it would result in a concussion and a bloody mess.

I think proper response to bullies is pretty context-specific, but I'm glad this worked out for you.

Your solution of landing 40 violent blows on a kid's face is probably not a better alternative to this app.

I was taken to the principal after breaking one of the bullies' head - her comment - "Surprised you didn't do that earlier" and that was all.

This is how humans work. There are a lot of comments here about how schools break down that sorta behaviour, and they might be right. But its also up to schools to teach kids how society works, so all that means is you have to tell your kid to punch the other kid, after school lets out. That's as much a societal lesson as standing up for yourself.