I’m still investigating bullying and interventions for bullied kids. Most of what I’ve come across is about how to support kids in not fighting back and telling an adult if they are getting bullied. Another take is learning the language of violence to become less of a target. Here are two videos about that.
The first video is a very short one (just watch the first 10 seconds), of a kid getting beaten up in a locker room. The second is a documentary of that same kid getting trained at the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Academy. It’s a commercial for the Gracies, but I found it moving to watch them work with this kid, give him some traction in this situation. They show him self defense stuff and, building on that confidence, how to hold himself socially so that he’ll be less likely to need to fight. That’s what I’m most interested in, the reduction in violence.
Some folks think that learning to fight is a bad way to reduce violence, and as far as I know it’s still an empirical question, if knowing martial arts reduces the amount of school fighting you will become involved in. What protects them from the instrument fallacy, for example? If your hammer is Jiu-Jitsu, won’t more confrontations look like inevitable fights?
My guess, though, is that it does reduce violence, at least outside of formal sparring. There’s a potential leveling up, developmentally, in learning a martial art. At a certain age, establishing a dominance hierarchy makes developmental sense. Knowing how to handle oneself in violent situations, feeling less helpless and scared, could decrease the chances of a traumatic event slowing your progress out of that dominance-hierarchy stage. At the same time, martial arts usually come along with an ethical code, to use your skills only to defend yourself or someone else, for example. Any sufficiently sophisticated ethical code which is internalized will also help a kid progress out of might-makes-right. It will also likely help other kids around them do the same, just by seeing higher level ethics in action.
Nathen's Miraculous Escape 
January 3, 2016 at 5:59 pm
Somewhat jumbled thoughts: You are probably already familiar with Grossman’s book “On Killing”, and the surrounding controversy (maybe we’ve even discussed it?). He makes a point that I think is probably true, and relevant to the bullying / language-of-violence issue: people seem to think about violence very differently in proportion to how visceral or intimate it is. (Keegan makes a similar point about the development of guns and artillery, which began as things where you lit the fuse and ran like hell, and slowly have evolved into consciously sexy tools you can wear inside your pants.) Point is, American youth are now exposed very routinely to video games that simulate non-intimate violence: shooting, bombing, etc. It seems pretty unusual for these games to simulate close-range violence like cutting a throat (or even throwing a punch in first-person), though maybe I’m not up to speed on that. On the other hand, many societies have introduced boys to wrestling very early, while ours seems to be increasingly uncomfortable with that. Wrestling is more intimate than even most martial arts, and requires a very precise grammar to connote it as a non-erotic activity, which is usually very important to the participants. I think what I am going for here is the idea that FPS video games appeal to the appetite for violence, but remove the anxieties (including sexual anxieties) that have to get worked through in hand-to-hand fighting or sparring.