Wooly Bully

Bullying is a subject of persistent interest to victims, former victims, and parents of children who are bullied or seem likely to be bullied. The editors of SLATE like it too. Their latest article is this one:
Bullies. They can be stopped, but it takes a village.

Bullies, it seems, are pretty shrewd in picking their targets – they pick on the weak, those who can’t or won’t mount effective resistance. Personality, social isolation, and physical characteristics are all potential victim markers.

In the first Harry Potter book, Harry is routinely terrorized by his large and thuggish cousin. The cousin’s parents tolerated and encouraged this bullying, a circumstance that is all too common in real life, where parents and teachers look the other way or even encourage the bullying. Harry is a very unlikely victim though. Brave, resourceful, athletic, proud and charismatic, he is an almost perfect bully repelling force. Being possessed of some of Voldemort’s dark powers could hardly hurt either.

I grew up in a neighborhood without other boys near to me in age, and when I entered school I became a target of some bullying – I knew how to play with girls but not other boys. As a shy and socially inexperienced person I was probably a natural target. It didn’t help that I was a bit of a slow learner. I eventually figured out that I was bigger than the other kids and stronger than most, so that I pretty much escaped the victim trap.

That kind of natural immunity is purely luck, of course. Most victims don’t have that option. So what can parents (or victims) do if they don’t have the knack for getting a bloody horse’s head to show up in the perpetrator’s bed? The strategy the authors advocate has been tested and works, but it involves getting a whole lot of people, especially parents, teachers, and students, to sign on.

It’s easy to imagine that there are a lot of communities, including my own, where this would be a very hard sell.

That might leave home schooling and/or karate lessons.

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