I’ve been thinking about bullying a lot lately. My younger clients are often getting bullied at school, so I started looking for videos about how to handle bullying. That genre, it turns out, is both boring and useless. On the way, though, I fell down the strange and compelling rabbit hole of bully-fail videos. Someone is getting picked on, has enough of it, and fights back effectively. The bully thinks they are picking on someone weak, but they turn out to be tough. They make me squirm, just watching people treat each other so badly, but there’s something gripping about them, too.
Here’s an example:
This next one is a compilation mostly of the same type, but the section that got to me runs from 7:07 to 9:28, and is part of a less common but more moving version: Someone is getting bullied and someone else steps in to protect them.
I’ve watched the section from 7:07 to 9:28 many times now, and my reaction changed over time. The first time I was just really uncomfortable, waiting for Will to protect himself and then oh, so relieved when someone stepped up. After the first time, the painful part is how long it takes for anyone to stick up for him. I suppose they are giving him a chance to fight back, but it’s a really long chance. The other kids want to see a fight. After getting to that point, I started noticing how all these bully-fail videos are really bystander-fail videos. How is it OK, or even funny, that this particular bullying is going on? Where are all the tough but nice kids stepping in to stop bullies? There are no principles at play here except dominance, until someone steps up. And when someone does, it’s a major leveling up for the hero, from might-makes-right to some sense of principled right and wrong. From the standpoint of physical dominance hierarchies, protecting a weak person is taking on a liability to do the right thing. That weak person will be grateful, and might help you finish your math homework, but they will almost never help you out in a fight. And let’s face it – you probably don’t care much about your math homework.
I know those moments are a big deal because it happened to me. In 6th grade there was a kid who’d failed a couple times, much bigger than any of the other kids, who started pushing me around one day on the basketball court. I was small and sensitive and felt completely helpless. Suddenly, another kid knocked the first kid down, probably hit him a few times, and said something like, “If you touch my friend again, I’ll kick your ass again.” I still feel choked up, thinking about it, more than 30 years later. That’s how it should go.
[I look for this hero every year or so on the internet and he’s never turned up. Terry Quakendal. I’d like to thank him, as an adult, for what he did.]
This last one is not a bully fail video, but quite interesting. An adult calls his childhood bully to talk about what happened:
Nathen's Miraculous Escape 
December 17, 2015 at 3:38 pm
I’ve never been bullied. But, I watched kids be bullied in school, mainly junior high, and it was torture! I contacted one of the bullied kids as an adult to apologize for never doing anything. (It was a bunch of guys bullying one very large, awkward boy. It went on all year.) I also publicly shamed my whole class on a high school reunion site for all of us allowing that to go on. Not one person responded.
December 18, 2015 at 6:15 pm
Nathen, I’m glad to see that as soon as you post about not blogging, you start blogging again. I should try that. These videos are interesting, and I totally agree about them being “bystander fail” videos. Though sometimes people say that about war or crisis journalism, and I think the argument there is that it provides an eyewitness account for the public…and maybe this does, too, though it seems unlikely that that was the intent.
I am pleased with the change in cultural attitudes around bullying in the last decade or so. When I was in school, I remember being kind of paralyzed by my pacifist/Quaker upbringing, which carried a strong moral argument about nonviolence, but its practical suggestions were, as you say of “how to avoid bullying” videos, boring and useless. The upshot was that I felt like if I physically defended myself (or any other kids) from bullying, I would be a moral failure. But maybe more than that, there was this sort of cultural vocabulary of violence that I hadn’t learned. If you don’t speak the language, it doesn’t matter what you’re trying to say, and I think that goes for physical violence. I had no idea how to respond if someone threw a punch, and I remember that it took me a very long time to realize that the kids fighting in school in a quasi-consensual way were rarely going all-out; there were rules, or at least a kind of grammar. When I got into those kind of fights, I got reprimanded by my peers for being too aggressive.
I would imagine that a diet of action movies and FPS games and so forth is also bad, in a different way, for developing this vocabulary. But it seems like decent self-defense or martial arts classes are very good at teaching this stuff.
December 19, 2015 at 8:40 pm
Yes, this is exactly what I’m trying to think through. It may be that establishing a dominance hierarchy is developmentally mandated in adolescence, and the kids who are really punished break the rules of that process, mostly on the weak side but also in the middle video also on the over the top aggressive side. Also, I’m thinking about the way schools can be age-group ghettos with inadequate attention from humans with more developed ethics.
I almost posted another couple videos, one of a kid getting beat up really bad and then another of that kid getting trained for a week by one of the Gracie brothers. Quite moving, despite the advertising for the Gracies. You see the kid kind of level up, physically, and can imagine he won’t be scared to tussle, and so much less likely to have to. That’s what the videos about bullying are missing. They’re all about how bullying is bad so tell an adult right away. Never a word about how to stop being a target.