The way American society has handled bullying - acts by kids against other kids which, if they were adults, would be considered violent felonies - has been execrable at best.
I was listening to an old Jean Shepherd program which aired in the sixties in which he described how when he was a boy, he had been set upon by 6 or so other boys, and when he went to his mother for aid, he was told by his mother that he'd have to learn to fight his own battles. That was what way too many bullying victims were told for ages and ages.
How much has changed since the fifties and sixties? Quite a bit from what I see. And about time, too. Kid-on-kid crime has been tolerated for far too long.
In behavioral terminology, we refer to Antecedents to behavioral escalation as 1) "Establishing Operations": underlying vulnerabilities (often physiological) like lack of sleep, hungry ("hangry"), alcohol, PTSD, etc; 2) "Setting Events" (sometimes called "slow triggers") - previous events (usually the same day) that increase the likelihood of escalation and 3) "Triggers" - Temporally proximate events that act as "the last straw." - Michael Friga, PhD, BCBA-D
For my part, another "rationalization". As a child seeing mom come out of the bedroom disheveled just after hearing the "commotion" of father "disciplining" her, I have a memory of her coming out of the room, looking at me and telling me that "everything's all right" when it clearly wasn't. Even the victim of domestic violence will rationalize. How can she [usually a woman] not? It was also the moment, as a boy, for me, when I realized I could not "rationalize" the contradiction between words and actions. This, I think was the beginning when I could no longer trust (and had to question) Authority (parents are usually the first authority figures in our lives). The pathos was that it was mother who became hard to trust. She, who was the victim, as the confounding statement came from her. I can say that by the time she passed we did resolved all of this.
The way American society has handled bullying - acts by kids against other kids which, if they were adults, would be considered violent felonies - has been execrable at best.
I was listening to an old Jean Shepherd program which aired in the sixties in which he described how when he was a boy, he had been set upon by 6 or so other boys, and when he went to his mother for aid, he was told by his mother that he'd have to learn to fight his own battles. That was what way too many bullying victims were told for ages and ages.
How much has changed since the fifties and sixties? Quite a bit from what I see. And about time, too. Kid-on-kid crime has been tolerated for far too long.
In behavioral terminology, we refer to Antecedents to behavioral escalation as 1) "Establishing Operations": underlying vulnerabilities (often physiological) like lack of sleep, hungry ("hangry"), alcohol, PTSD, etc; 2) "Setting Events" (sometimes called "slow triggers") - previous events (usually the same day) that increase the likelihood of escalation and 3) "Triggers" - Temporally proximate events that act as "the last straw." - Michael Friga, PhD, BCBA-D
I love reading more about this, if you want to point me to more books, etc.
For my part, another "rationalization". As a child seeing mom come out of the bedroom disheveled just after hearing the "commotion" of father "disciplining" her, I have a memory of her coming out of the room, looking at me and telling me that "everything's all right" when it clearly wasn't. Even the victim of domestic violence will rationalize. How can she [usually a woman] not? It was also the moment, as a boy, for me, when I realized I could not "rationalize" the contradiction between words and actions. This, I think was the beginning when I could no longer trust (and had to question) Authority (parents are usually the first authority figures in our lives). The pathos was that it was mother who became hard to trust. She, who was the victim, as the confounding statement came from her. I can say that by the time she passed we did resolved all of this.