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Originally Posted by Neat Hedgehog
Articles like that make me sick. Not because of the content, but just because of their insipid attempts to appeal to emotion. I hate "news" like that.
Plus, I can't really feel sorry for people who kill themselves over nonsense like this. Does it suck to get bullied? As a guy who is 5'10 and roughly 110lbs, yeah, I can say from experience that it does indeed suck. At the same time, though, if you feel like things are really so messed up it's not worth living, then you may as well try to kill the people messing with you, since you're convinced you already have nothing to lose. That's about what I did. Except the abusive jerk in my case wasn't even just some random idiot at school, it was my older brother. Even with that sort of "attachment" I didn't really have any trouble strangling him one day and telling him that if he didn't back off, I was gonna knife him. He moved out not long after that, and I haven't seen him in six years. My mother still never believes that anything like that could have happened, though, because after all, he was so perfect. She is completely unwilling to accept my accounts as anything other than "things I dreamed" or "I was just taking things too seriously."
Now, that was someone who, at the time, outweighed me by about 100lbs and was five years older. I don't think these many of these highschool kids really have such a big strength / size gap between them, so it shouldn't really be that big a deal. If someone won't lay off, and nobody listens to you, then bash someone's teeth in. If you can't win in a fair fight that way, then make it unfair. I can't sympathize with people who aren't willing to stand up for themselves as best as they can.
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It's one thing to stand up for yourself, it's another to reduce yourself to the tormentor's level or go below it to do so. How do you think the bullying starts in the first place? Encouragement of violence and cruelty as a means of sorting out life. To get violent on someone as retribution is just feeding the whole cycle and setting yourself up to become the douchebag bully yourself.
I definitely believe in standing up for yourself, and some tough love really helps, but it needs to be done in properly or you just become an animal. The problem here is that you've got so-called authority figures who are making that difficult. Fine, if the people around you won't do anything about it, get an outsider involved. Predation only goes on so long as there is nobody in the situational 'food chain' above the predator willing to do anything about it.
Over in Bermuda where my sister lives and teaches, a popular practice for disciplinary issues is to bring in a third party, an authority figure in one or all of the involved parties' lives, who has no stock in the image of what's going on to sort things out. You get kids who were beating up other kids getting chewed out by their martial arts instructor or their sports coach or something, and you would not believe how chastened the kid is by that.
One further cautionary note: what I say about predation only lasting as long as there's not a bigger predator around? That applies to the broader social context of your neighborhood, too. You might have gotten away with beating your brother down, but go ahead and try that in the inner city on the kind of kid who goes around being a bastard for the kicks. You'll have some guy you don't know shoving a .45 up your ass faster than you'd imagine.